Another Name
by Guard of the Heradi
Summary: "Live today, fight tomorrow." Set a few years after Ghost Protocol, this four-part FanFiction chronicles the relationship between Agent Brandt and Agent Hume OC during their service to IMF. Since publication has been re-edited, includes some altered and a little new material.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: First thing, disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters or organisations described here, and make no monetary profit from the publication of this fanfiction, blah blah. The only element of this fanfiction is the character Enma-O Meido and her aliases. So no stealing her please. Below are the lyrics to _Watercolour_, by Pendulum. Obviously, the song belongs to them, I just listened to it, and it partly inspired an enormous chunk of Part I.**

**Secondly, should let you all know where this is going. This story jumps around chronologically quite a bit. Typically, anything in italics happened at least a few months previous to the main story line, but the earliest event happens maybe a couple of years after the events of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It prominently features Agent William Brandt, played by the brilliant chameleon Jeremy Renner, and also 'guest stars' Agents Benji Dunn, Ethan Hunt, Luther Stickell, and mentions other characters from the Mission Impossible film series.**

**The main plot concerns only the development of a relationship between Agent Brandt and my own character. A lot is never stated outright, because I can imagine that IMF agents make the best poker players. This development is shown mostly through the missions these characters embark on, either together and alone, and how these missions both bring them together and drive them apart. The missions do not have any particular continuity of plot linking them together, much like the different missions of the films.**

**There will be four parts to this story. This is the first, the rest are written but are currently being edited, and so I can't promise any schedule for the release of chapters, it will depend on the reaction this gets.**

**So, without further ado...**

* * *

_When I'm falling down  
__Will you pick me up again?  
__When I'm too far gone  
__Dead in the eyes of my friends_

_Will you take me out of here?  
When I'm staring down the barrel  
When I'm blinded by the lights  
When I cannot see your face_

_Take me out of here  
Take me out of here  
Take me out of here  
Take me out of here_

_All I believe  
And all I've known  
Are being taken from me  
Can't get home  
__Yeah, do your worst  
When worlds collide  
Let their fear collapse  
Bring no surprise_

_Take me out of here_

_Feed the fire, break your vision  
Throw your fists up, come on with me  
Feed the fire, break your vision  
__Throw your fists up, come on with me  
__Feed the fire, break your vision  
__Throw your fists up, come on with me  
__Feed the fire, break your vision  
__Throw your fists up, come on with me_

_Just stay where you are  
Let your fear subside  
Just stay where you are  
If there's nothing to hide_

_Feed the fire, break your vision  
Throw your fists up, come on with me  
Feed the fire, break your vision  
Throw your fists up, come on with me  
__Feed the fire, break your vision  
__Throw your fists up, come on with me  
__Feed the fire, break your vision  
__Throw your fists up, come on with me  
__Feed the fire, break your vision  
__Throw your fists up, come on with me_

* * *

**ANOTHER NAME**

* * *

William Brandt was never a fan of his office. It was all glass in a building that had no windows. Typical. From within there was nothing hidden that you could not hide behind a good poker face, but looking from the outside, there was nothing to be seen. Right now, that was not the reason he didn't like his office. He didn't like the glass because of what it separated him from.

The years since his re-enlisting to IMF in Seattle under Ethan Hunt had been good to him. He'd broken a few ribs, taken a bullet, had even almost drowned again. Thankfully, or maybe not, all on separate occasions. All of that had just heralded his promotion. Technically a Chief Analyst once again, these days he formulated his own missions, or was the one making the recordings for the agents he selected to carry them out. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." was a line he'd used many a time now. Chief Strategist, it said on his door now. Sometimes the best strategy was doing things yourself because you know the most about it. Sometimes others were better for the role. Either way, fewer bullets with his name on.

It was a good gig. He now had an apartment that he actually lived in. There was food in the fridge that hadn't gone off. He was even thinking of getting a cat, now that he was unlikely to starve one to death or lose to sympathetic neighbours. Speaking of, his neighbours actually knew what he looked like, although they thought he was a civil servant called Jerry Menneer. The neighbour's daughter had a really blatant crush on him, but she wasn't his type. There wasn't a type best suited to IMF agents, as he knew from experience and had been told plenty of times before, particularly by Agents Stickell and Gormley. Never mind that Declan Gormley had left the field with Zhen Lei after she was injured on an operation. Lucky...

Brandt shook his head. His thoughts were too muddled, and were running away with themselves. It was late, very late, not that he could see the night sky to know. He leant his head against the glass and breathed deeply. No matter how good things were - and they were, he hadn't been shot at in three months - there was always something to complicate things.

Today he'd assigned someone to a mission. It had come from the depths of IMF's most secretive sections, from intel he'd never seen and knew almost nothing about, so 'assigned' wasn't the best word to describe it: he'd been the messenger. He didn't need to be the messenger, but the mission was, in his own words, so nasty it deserved to be delivered in person. It was a solo mission with a very specific and uninformative brief. Reading what little he had to go on, Brandt knew that it didn't really matter whether the actual mission was a success. One way or another, it would have a result, and had been calculated to do so. The fact that it was solo, without even technical support, told him one thing: IMF was not prepared to lose too many agents to this mission. Unfortunately, what little he did have to go on told him also that it was too important not to go through with. After hearing of it, he volunteered himself. The director declined, and chose for him instead.

So, he gave the brief.

"This is Tom Hobbes, one of the world's most prolific biochemical weapons dealers. Two weeks ago, the IMF were successful in shutting down his operations in a massive sting operation by capturing and/or terminating all of his lieutenants in multiple locations across the globe. We attempted to pick him up in Rio de Janeiro at the same time, but he evaded capture, and is currently at large. Hobbes is considered an asset; through him, we have access to all of his buyers. Thirty six hours ago, IMF received intelligence that Hobbes is now in a Bangkok private clinic awaiting extensive plastic surgery.

"This," Brandt pointed to a photo on the display, "is his current face. Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." he trailed off for a second, cleared his throat, and continued, "is to positively ID Hobbes after his surgery. We need a picture of his actual face, and preferably DNA samples to confirm it's him.

"The surgery is due to begin in three days. After this kind of surgery normally a patient would be kept in for post-op observation for a couple of months at least, but Hobbes is renown for being paranoid, and now that his network is fully stunted, we're expecting him to be more so. He might not stay very long. IMF wants a picture that can be used to track him over CCTV cameras all over the world, so they need an actual face for the face recognition, not a post-op swell-up that just gives us an approximate render."

Brandt paused, took a deep breath. "There is another thing; we have a message to deliver to him."

And he told the agent across from him the message.

The agent stared at him for a second, laughed, and, after discussing the details for a lot longer, accepted. Strategy, point of entry, exit options, and the contact details for a back-up extraction team were memorised at that meeting. And then Brandt left the agent to pour over the plans alone for a while longer.

The agent was now leaving. Brandt lifted his head from the glass and watched.

Agent Hume earned her nickname on her very first mission: Ninja. She hadn't been a fan at first when it caught on with her fellow agents at IMF, but eventually became indifferent to it. All agents of IMF were used to having multiple identies, multiple aliases. Ninja was just another name.

She always looked so young still. Every time he saw her, all Brandt could think was how tiny she looked, barely five and a half feet tall, admittedly only a handful of inches shorter than him. Under her jacket she had a glock tucked into her black combat pants, and a knife in her boot, strapped to her right ankle. Her dark, shoulder length hair was tied in a messy ponytail to the side, with the left side falling out because her hair wasn't really long enough.

Brandt knew that 'Ninja' was an apt nickname. If anyone could do this, it was probably her... He still stared at her as though he was never going to see her again.

She stopped walking towards the elevators, turned her head to peer over her shoulder, and smiled up at him. With a wave, she disappeared.

She was beautiful. He would always remember his last sight of her from that moment.

* * *

"I like the new face, Mr Hobbes."

Tom Hobbes, aged forty-five, originally British but now a 'man of the world' as he liked to call his nationality, started and lashed out instinctively as the flash of a camera blinded him. Next thing he knew his still-aching jaw was in agony again, and he was pressed against the wall, a hand clawing his head. It had taken weeks for the swelling around his face to go down, for weeks he'd forced himself to be reasonable and recuperate in the clinic, away from prying eyes. He should have gone with his gut that told him the prying eyes would have come for him anyway.

"I have a message for you."

A woman? Standing over six foot tall, he could feel he towered over his assailant, but she had his arms twisted so far back he might as well have been only a foot tall. He knew that in this grip, if he moved he'd only break his own arms.

"No matter what you do, or where you go, we will find you. Don't let us down."

Wait... a message from... who? Them? Or a client...?

Gun shots deafened him, the pressure on his arm released, and he felt the roots of his hair being yanked out. Yelling, he lashed out again behind him, feeling freed, only for his fist to pass through nothing. He stared at his bodyguards. Where did she go?

"GET HER! KILL HER!"

She'd seen his face. Not once had he seen hers.

* * *

_Three Years Ago_

_"...I'm telling you, this girl is the dog's bollocks, okay? She hacked IMF in half an hour. Twenty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds, to be precise. That's how fast she got through our firewalls. No idea how she did it. None, whatsoever. Do you know how long it would take me to hack IMF from outside the server? She must have been lucky, is what I say, 'cos no one, and I mean no one, is that -"_

_"Benji."_

_"Yes?"_

_"You're babbling."_

_A pause. "Oh."_

_Benji hadn't shut up about this case since the moment he'd been assigned to it. Rumours only fuelled his drivel. It was grating on Brandt's nerves so much, he was very seriously contemplating kicking Benji out of the van._

_To be fair to Agent Dunn, this was an intriguing case. They were here - here being in a van parked at the end of a suburban avenue in D.C - to apprehend a hacker. They were waiting for the hacker's relatives to leave the premises. The foster aunt - the subject's foster-mother's sister - was due to take her two middle-schoolers to a football game at their school to cheerlead. The hacker had been overheard to have made other plans, though at last sight she was still in her pyjamas when she finally appeared in the backyard around lunch time, evidently having only just woken up, and did a light calisthenics routine. So, whatever her other plans were, evidently they did not involve getting changed._

_William Brandt peered over the file again. It had been compiled over twelve hours, and, remembering his Analyst days, it was sloppy work. Amongst the mass of mere facts, Enma-O Meido was twenty-two years old, and had just finished her degree at MIT, majoring in Computer Science. Her biological mother, Louise Mill, was a Columbia University student, and had died from injuries sustained when her car crashed on icy roads as she drove herself to the hospital when she went into labour. Meido's biological father was Mill's professor of East Asian languages, one Tetsuo Toyoda from Hiroshima, Japan. Upon Mill's death and his subsequent custody, he named his new-born daughter Enma-O Meido and gave her up for adoption. She was formally adopted at the age of two by her foster parents Freddy and Joanna Locke, and at the age of six moved with her foster family to Joanna Locke's native Washington D.C. Before starting at MIT, she officially changed her name to Emma Locke._

_To pass the time, Brandt put Enma-O and Meido into Google, wondering what or who Toyoda had named his daughter after, having not passed on neither his name nor her mother's. He wasn't sure what to make of Toyoda's choices._

_Her academic record was varied. She was the anchor for the girls' relay sprint team in high school. In Literature and Humanities subjects Meido was a high B-average student, whilst her grades were amongst the National top percentile for AP Computer Science. Once at MIT her grades varied widely again from almost perfect marks to just above average. Upon reading them, Benji surmised she probably did what he did at Cambridge; got lazy and spent more time playing around with her computer than studying for her exams._

_She had no criminal record, seemingly had no political agenda, had no unsavoury connections. The only interesting detail was that one of her professors at MIT had worked for MI6 a long time ago. Other than that, once she had liked an article supporting gay marriage in the US on Facebook; the most controversial thing IMF had managed to find out about her at such short notice._

_Meido, on the other hand, knew that IMF existed. Members of the CIA didn't know IMF existed._

_Brandt scratched the stubble on his chin. He'd been called very quickly and unexpectedly to oversee the team instructed to take Meido/Locke in, and had never bothered to replace the shaving cream in his bathroom in his dusty apartment. At first when he found out what the assignment was he thought he was being punished for something. Then he reckoned it was just because he happened to be in the neighbourhood, so to speak. Then he was told it was a reward for nearly getting killed on his last mission, as a respite as it were. After that, he got the impression he was being tested._

_Sitting in the van with Benji, also on a 'respite' after getting electrocuted by a server with a very nasty firewall, Brandt thought this didn't make much of a 'respite', he'd prefer to just go on vacation._

_Then Benji suddenly started pointing at the screen in front of them. Miss Locke had just exited the house with her foster aunt and her cousins, ushering them into the Honda. She waved as the family drove away, and then stayed standing in the driveway. She peered down the road to the van, and then headed back up to the house as both Brandt and Benji held their breath. She went inside, and reappeared a minute later, a pitcher of home-made lemonade in one hand and two glasses in the other. She poured herself a glass, sat down at the porch table, and cleared her throat._

_"I imagine someone's listening by now."_

_Brandt glared at Benji, whose eyes widened and he shook his head fervently, mouthing 'I didn't do anything!'._

_"After last night I expected someone to show up," Locke said out loud, her eyes scanning over everything she could see, unsure who she was actually addressing. "I didn't... I didn't mean any harm when I hacked your system. I was just... curious." She took a deep breath, clearly very nervous, but resolute. "It would be nice to talk to an actual person, so I'll be right here. Patty and the kids don't get back until dinner time, so you've got a couple of hours or so. No rush."_

_And with that, she leaned back in her chair, and twiddled her thumbs, blushing with embarrassment._

_Silence fell in the van. Benji looked from the screens fixed on the young woman to Brandt and back again. "You're not going to..." he trailed off as Brandt raised a silencing finger. Then..._

_"Oh, and by the way," Miss Locke pipped up, seemingly because she couldn't help it, "Impossible Missions Force is the most ridiculous name I've ever heard, it's like something out of a sixties tv show. Just thought I'd get that off my chest." And then she went silent again, looking like she felt completely foolish._

_Brandt grinned despite himself. He straightened up as much as the van allowed, tucked his gun into its holster under his jacket, put his 'sunglasses' on, and got out before Benji could object._

_He was glad he accepted now._

* * *

The glass smashed as a body hurled itself through it. Agent Hume groaned as the glass bit into her hands as she picked herself up and sprinted away from the building, focusing on the traffic in the road ahead rather than the screams, yells and gunshots from behind. A bullet whizzed past her ear, and screams came from ahead as people started to panic. Lifting her own gun she shot the locks in the gate and using her speed burst through and darted in-between the cars, keeping as low as possible as windshields started to explode around her. Under the gunshots she heard SUVs revving up, swore under her breath, and yanked a bewildered driver off his motorbike and started weaving through the traffic, working her phone as she did so. Blindly typing in the contact number she'd memorised, she hoped to God her back-up was ready to assist.

As she started to get ahead of the panic that was freezing the cars on the road, into the thick of Bangkok's hub, she rattled off the pass-codes to confirm her identity as fast as she could and, without pausing for breath, begged for her life. "Prize snapped, message relayed, _get me out of here_!"

Then her shoulder exploded in agony, splattering the motorbike with blood, and Agent Hume thought no more.

* * *

"Agent Brandt?"

Brandt blinked, confused. It was 4am, and he was in his bed, in his apartment, and he had been asleep. For all he knew, he could have still been asleep when he answered his phone and gave his pass-code.

"Yes?"

"Special Agent Hunt just informed us that his team picked up Agent Hume near the Thai/Cambodian border, sir. He's requested your assistance in bringing her home. The plane is ready to take you to Bangkok."

Now he was awake. "On my way."

* * *

_Emma Locke turned in her chair when she heard the van door close. She watched as a man in a navy suit, with short dark-blonde hair and a useful-looking watch made his way towards her aunt and uncle's home. From a distance he looked young, and as he got closer his youth became more ambiguous; she hadn't the faintest idea how old he was. His hands were big, worn, like they packed quite a punch. Somehow there was nothing about his appearance that surprised her, except maybe the hint of bemusement on his face. Maybe it was her last comment. Most of all though, she got the impression that he was just as curious about her as she was about him, and that put her at ease. A little, anyway._

_As he warily made his way up the driveway and up the steps to the porch, she suddenly wished she hadn't felt so self-conscious all through the morning, and wasn't so under-dressed. She'd barely slept, woke at dawn, and stayed in bed, expecting to hear the house being raided. As the sun came up and nothing happened, she remained in bed, trying to think. So as not to alarm her hosts, she finally emerged from the guest room in her over-sized graduation t-shirt and some shorts, yawned a lot, had a coffee whilst the kids had sandwiches for lunch, and did star-jumps and sit-ups in the backyard like she did everyday. She pretended she was too lazy to go for her usual run round the neighbourhood, and played Gears of War with her cousins, giggling as she obliterated them every time. She was due to go back to her parents' house in three days; she hoped - hopelessly, she knew - that 'IMF' would hold off until she left her relatives' home._

_Then she spotted the van at the end of the road as she waved her cousins off, and her gut told her to stay calm. You are not a threat, she told herself. Do not act like one. So she spoke aloud, and hoped that whoever was listening was patient. The idea of showering or changing never occurred to her._

_The man in front of her now looked like he could out-wait her any day. He also looked so professional that she couldn't help but feel embarrassed about the stubble on her legs, her bare feet, and the bags under her eyes._

_He was pretty hot..._

_"Miss Locke?" She snapped herself from her silly thoughts. "May I sit down?"_

_She gestured nervously to the seat across from her, and watched as he carefully seated himself. "Help yourself to lemonade, if you like," she offered, and then chewed her lip, feeling foolish. She took a sip from her own glass, as if to prove she hadn't poisoned it, and before she could stop herself pulled a face at how tart it was. Maybe it was her expression that put him off trying it. Or, as she realised a split second later, if she'd wanted to poison him, she could have just put the poison in the glass. Stupid..._

_"I'm IMF Agent William Brandt," he introduced himself. "Do you know who I am?"_

_She frowned, shook her head. "No, I don't," she said. Then she flinched, remembering. "I did get to the gateway for personnel, but I thought that would be too intrusive, so I didn't look," she admitted._

_He didn't react. "So what did you look at?"_

_She shrugged innocently. "You mean, like secret files and stuff? Not a lot." She cleared her throat. "I took a wander through the systems, but I didn't actually peek at anything. There were a lot of code-names for different things, I tried to steer clear of those. I didn't cover myself, so your server should have a history of my viewings. You can look at my computer too, I didn't download anything." She smiled despite herself. "That would have been really difficult, if I'd tried that though. It's a pretty good system. I just..." She shrugged. "I just found the right holes at the right times, and just went for them. If I'd tried to cover my tracks, I would never have made it through; it would have taken too long, and I probably wouldn't have gotten through the first set of firewalls."_

_She suddenly realised she was talking too much, and stared at her hands in her lap._

_Brandt studied her through his sunglasses, knew that Benji was studying her through them too. "Why did you do it then?" he asked._

_She looked up again, and smiled weakly. "Job hunting." She sat forward a bit, intent. "One of my professors said he reckoned I had the right mind for Intelligence, I think he was a retired spook or something. He said I should 'scout around', see whether or not I wanted to apply for the CIA or... something. IMF was mentioned in a file on their network, so I decided to take a peek. Wasn't expecting what I found..."_

_Brandt suppressed a smile. "And? What do you think?"_

_She looked him right in the eyes, straight through the glasses. "If you'll have me, I... I want in."_

_"Brandt?" Composing himself, Brandt didn't react to the annoying voice sounding in his microphone, and continued to the study the girl before him. "We've just had an update on her file. That professor of hers she mentioned, he recommended her for recruitment to MI6. One of their headhunters actually met her, she's in their records. Apparently she turned them down."_

_Thank you, Benji, Brandt wanted to say, for interrupting. He remembered his mission: to assess Emma Locke for recruitment._

_No agent of IMF ever looked like the same man or woman that they were before they joined IMF. None of them, himself included. He himself was a Marine, a kid who went off to war with a happy-go-lucky attitude. That was a whole other story._

_Reason told him that this girl had proved pretty reckless, risking a lifetime in prison for her curiosity, that that wasn't always a trait most admired by the IMF. But he also didn't know a single agent who wasn't reckless when they needed to be. They all risked plenty every day of their lives working for IMF, whether they worked at a desk or in a supply chain or in the field on operations. Reason also told him that if IMF didn't take her, someone else would. MI6 might try again some day, or the CIA would get whiff of her._

_His gut told him her professor was right. She'd need to be trained, but they all did when they joined IMF. His gut told him that when she passed - when, not if - things would never be the same for her._

_Or that things would never be the same for him._

_So he helped himself to a glass of lemonade, put his glasses down on the table, and took a sip. "Tell your aunt before you leave to use more water, not more sugar."_

* * *

Brandt jogged across the tarmac to the hangar, spotting the silhouette of Agent Stickell up ahead, and slowed as he approached. The usual humour in Luther Stickell's face had been drawn out, and he looked tired and weary, but he shook Brandt's hand all the same.

"Brandt. Ethan had to go, something came up." He turned to look over his shoulder. "She hasn't said anything yet, but the medics think she's mostly all there still. She did give us this though." He handed Brandt Hume's iPhone, chipped and sticky with blood, but intact and still alive. "We've already got a copy, it's on the system now. She got us hair samples too, from when he checked in and when she took the photo." Stickell sighed. "Get her home, man. She deserves it. The Ninja did good." And he started to leave.

"Luther!" Brandt called after him, stopping him in his tracks. "What happened?"

* * *

The bullet speared itself into her shoulder, splattering blood everywhere, and she gripped hard on to everything as she screamed. The bike swerved for a moment, and then she bit down. _Mind over matter, mind over... shit, this hurts_! She focused on the road, focused on not looking back. Using the reflections on the abandoned cars, she counted two SUVs, and another man grabbing a motorcycle off of a civilian. She accelerated and yelled into her phone again. "I repeat, prize snapped, message relayed, being pursued, need immediate evac to secure the package!"

"Stand by, Ninja," Special Agent Hunt replied calmly, and the phone went silent once again.

* * *

"Hobbes sent his entire team to chase after her," Luther told soberly. "We couldn't get a secure link to her phone to extract the pictures, so we directed her to a safe house about twenty miles outside Bangkok. She couldn't drop her tail; Hobbes' men are amongst the best in the world, and she was injured. She thought she'd lost them after a while - we thought she had as well - and she headed for the rendezvous. But the location had been compromised; by the time we got there to pick her up, it was in flames, and she'd gone again."

* * *

Her gun spat out the empty mag, and before it even dropped to the floor she had a new one in and was firing again. She counted two dead already, another bleeding out. She ducked as machine gun fire tore the wooden wall of the beach hut she was hiding behind to shreds. She waited for the pause, and rolled out of cover, aimed and fired. Three dead, fourth on his way. Bullets spat sand up in her face and she was on the move again, sprinting towards the car she'd hot-wired from the city, spraying covering fire behind her as she went, and dived into the beaten Mercedes. She sped into the Jeep in front, making it spin into the men who were covering behind it, crushing them into the stone wall behind, and drove away into the dark.

This time she didn't call for back-up.

* * *

"We managed to track the GPS on her phone, and started catching up with her, took care of her tail, and managed to get to her just in time..."

* * *

The gunshots in the distance had stopped, or maybe her hearing was on its way out. The road ahead in the dawn was bleary, and her hands on the wheel were starting to shake.

Tears of disappointment streamed down her face. She'd actually got what she came for, and now she was going to die. All over a paranoid arms dealer the IMF had been trying to push over the edge. It didn't seem like enough somehow.

She'd done her best, but she was finally bleeding out. If she'd had time, she could have bandaged herself up enough to last until she could get the bullet out, but she'd never had time that night. They'd been relentless, chasing after her, sniffing her out again when they'd lost her. She wasn't a failure, she told herself, she knew how to lose a tail. She got rid of the bike, changed clothes, double-backed in her new appearance to cover her tracks, even faked a disability to disguise holding her arm to steady her bleeding shoulder. But this... this wasn't anything she'd been prepared for. They just hadn't given up. They had eyes all over the city, and they picked her up again and again.

She hadn't given up either though. But sometimes that isn't enough.

She thought about her parents, and the happy, solid childhood they'd secured for her. Of the state-of-the-art computer they'd given her for her fourteenth birthday after finding out how she was acing her Computer Literacy classes. Of her friends at her high school's computer club, and the girls she ran with in the athletics team. Of her friends at MIT in her dorm and on her course. Of the handful of guys she'd had crushes on, and the few she'd ever had any fun with.

She thought of meeting Agent Brandt, her recruiter and mentor, of how handsome he looked the day she met him in his suit and IMF glasses. She thought of the reluctance that he'd tried and failed to hide from her as he told her the brief for this mission face-to-face, rather than on a recording. She thought of seeing him leaning against the glass in his office, looking at her like he knew she was going to die.

And with that thought, she passed out, unaware that her car was still going at full speed, heading more towards the ditch than to salvation.

* * *

"Her car flipped when it came off the road. Medics reckon she'd already lost consciousness by then, never even noticed," Luther told Brandt. "She's lucky, really lucky, to be alive at all. She got pretty bashed up, and her car blew not long after we pulled her out of it." Luther took a deep breath. "I haven't seen even Ethan look that bad before. We all get wounded, that's normal. Just not that much in one helping, that usually just tells us we're coming home in a body-bag."

Silence fell between the two men. Then Luther came back and clapped Brandt on the shoulder. "Take care of her, man. Get her home." And then he vanished into the shadows again.

Brandt couldn't bring himself to look at her as the medics wheeled her across to the jet. He went on ahead of the stretcher so he didn't have to follow it, sat with the pilots during take-off, and when he went out to the fuselage he stayed at the front, lay on the bench, and tried to sleep, reminding himself he was still on Eastern time. At first he didn't really think he would sleep. But then...

* * *

_New trainee Emma Locke reputedly had a computer for a memory: they told her anything once, and it was filed away and organised with everything else they taught her, and then tag words would make everything crop up, complete with their connections. Her athletics background gave her a basic foundation for all of her physical training, and she'd willingly pushed herself up to the gear she needed to be in. She was a quick thinker with quick response times; her martial arts instructor wrote that she fought like the best of chess players, that she could strategise her moves at lightening speed._

_No more the modest, nervous hacker._

_Brandt met her only twice during her training, which was typically far more than most active field agents met recruits. The first time was on the running track, running in opposite directions, a handful of months after their first ever meeting. It was early, just after full dawn, and he'd just finished a night of watching CCTV footage to research on a target and was trying to wind himself down. She looked fresh-faced and focused, quite a different woman from the girl he'd met in the suburbs. She didn't seem to notice him at all, or recognise him._

_The second time she did remember him._

_She was a month away from being passed for active duty, a few ticks away from a perfect examination. She'd been cleared on technical a long time ago, and could have joined the technicians team immediately if she so chose, but had continued. Over the last two years she'd trained with the best, with Special Forces to get into peak physical condition and to attain combat experience, and then when they gave her the go-ahead, with IMFs best instructors on tactical, espionage, and action. A few weeks ago she'd passed her explosives test, disarming a live unit and using the components to rearm it on a specified target. She'd learnt how to be visible and invisible, unforgettable and instantly forgettable in a crowd. She had steady hands for sharp-shooting, a calm head with all firearms, and had set the fastest time for compiling an M82 sniper rifle blindfolded. The only thing she was lacking, and knew she was lacking, was, in the words of her instructors, 'punch'._

_The gym in the IMF's lowest levels was accessible to all agents, was encouraged to be used. People stagnated behind desks, so the gym, swimming pool and firing-range was open to all. Late one night Trainee Field Agent Locke snuck in, and was letting rip on the punch bag. She'd been at it for a while, and her arms were aching from her efforts, but something in the bag would not relent. She blamed never having gotten into a fight before, on having no idea what it felt like to really punch someone. She excelled at minimal-contact attacks and counter-attacks, on blocking and defending herself, but actually beating someone to a pulp so they were not a threat was something else entirely._

_"You have to mean it."_

_Startled, she turned, instinctively moved towards her concealed pistol in her sweatshirt on the bench. Forgetting that the punch bag was swaying, it nearly knocked her off her feet as it swung back. Regaining her balance, she blushed. She knew him... how could she forget..._

_"Agent Brandt," she acknowledged, standing straighter, respectfully at attention._

_He chuckled. "No need for 'agent' in here," he told her, gesturing to the walls of the gym. "When we're in here, we're all 'training', my instructors used to tell me."_

_She smiled. "They tell me too."_

_He unzipped his hoodie, stuffed it into his duffel bag and dropped it in the corner. "You have to mean it," Brandt repeated to her, pointing to the punch bag behind her._

_She looked at it uncertainly, and looked back at him. "My instructors tell me I'm not 'mean' enough to mean it."_

_The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. "I highly doubt that." As she frowned, surprised and bemused, he studied her for a second and then gestured her over to the sparring ring. "Come, sparr with me."_

_He went and put some gloves on to protect his knuckles, stretched for a moment, and climbed up into the ring. She was already there. He never heard her move. That was another thing written on her reports: silent as an owl._

_Brandt allowed himself a second to admire the creature before him. She was twenty-four now. In a sports bra and loose Adidas bottoms, she didn't slouch, was poised, light on her feet. Her stomach was flat and toned, her forearms and shoulders built stronger. Even her face seemed more defined now, the left over child's fat and extra from her student days of living on pizzas and beer were long gone. All she needed was a bit more colour, she'd spent too much time underground in the IMF maze, not enough in the sun._

_Looking at her made him feel old. He had over ten years of field experience over her, and the time when he was a young recruit, a little younger than she was now, felt like far too many missions ago._

_He bounced on his feet, signalling his readiness, and got into a start-off stance, watched as she did the same. Immediately he noticed the difference between himself and her: his fists were closed, ready to attack; her fingers were loose, ready to deflect. So, he stared her down for a moment, and then lunged. She vanished, and next thing he knew he was on his back, her grip tight on his arm. The air in his lungs coughed out of him in pure surprise, and he stared up at her as she extended a hand to help him up._

_"I'm a bit further along than the foundation stuff, Brandt," she teased. She grabbed his other hand and yanked him to his feet. "Want to actually sparr now? I want to see how I fare."_

_He grinned, nodded, and got ready again, focusing. She lunged instead, he blocked, twisted her attack, ducked under her counter, tried to off-balance her with her own first lunge, attacked, and ducked away as she countered that too. In a couple of seconds, he failed to knock her to her feet, and she'd almost had him back on the floor again. Her instructor was right: she fought like a chess player. But as she grinned, assuming they were pausing again, he swung his leg out at her ankles, knocking her to the floor. She landed on her back too, spluttering as the air forced itself out of her lungs too. Realising her mistake, she swung back to her feet herself, ready again._

_And then they were off._

_He remembered fleetingly that she had studied self-defence at MIT, and it showed in her style, had helped her when she was learning CQC. Not trusting the force of her attacks, she used the force of his to disable him. He could just imagine trying to fight her in a confined space, and she'd have thrown him against the walls, used tables and chairs, cabinets, whatever was around to batter the shit out of him without ever needing to actually punch him for the KO. If he'd actually been fighting her he would have used that reluctance to his advantage though. There were a few times when he could have knocked her out; to her credit she always seemed to know she'd shown a weak spot or a window to attack, and closed them the moment she realised. To an outsider, their sparring match was fairly brutal even though they never actually hit each other, but sadly he was going easy on her. In the field, she would not have such luck to correct her own mistakes as she went along._

_Finally, after she'd flipped him over onto the floor again, twisting his arm behind him he slammed his palm on the floor to signal a break. "Time-out!"_

_A moment passed, and finally the pressure on his arm, and subsequently everywhere else, was gone. He rolled on to his back, watched her sink down to sit next to him, breathing hard. Then he realised how tense she was. "You alright?" He asked. She nodded unconvincingly, and retied her messy hair to occupy her fidgetting hands._

_Then he really looked at her. No wonder she was tense. She was tiny, and she was young, and she was a woman: a world of bigger, older, rougher men faced her. Her life thus far had been stable, despite its macabre beginnings. What did she know about willing to kill more experienced men than she with her bare hands?_

_He let the silence calm her for a few minutes, and then spoke gently. "I lost a friend today." Her head lifted and she turned to look down at him, the tension paused. "Agent Carter was killed in action in Madrid a few hours ago. She was trying to save a fellow agent's life." He scratched his nose. "She was never quite the same after Agent Hanaway was killed in Budapest, even after Mumbai," he thought aloud. "I always thought she hoped killing Moreau would help. Never really works that way though."_

_Emma nodded sympathetically. "I read the file on Cobalt... and Croatia. The official one, and the actual one."_

_He frowned. "How the hell did you read about Croatia?"_

_She smiled innocently. "How did you think I passed my technical tests? It's always easier to root around from the inside."_

_He laughed uncomfortably. "You know I could get you into all kinds of shit for that?"_

_"Only if the boss didn't know," she teased. "Director Brassel wanted the systems tested, so I did. That's how the firewalls got improved, I gave in my report, and that passed my technical exam."_

_Brandt snorted with amusement. "Okay. What did the file say?"_

_"On Croatia?" Hume shrugged. "The official one ends with Julia Hunt's death. The actual one effectively says you quit the field for nothing."_

_He sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, I did."_

_"Do you regret it?"_

_He glanced up at her. Ever curious. "I did. Now, not so much. I had good days as an analyst after I quit the field." He glanced up again. "I did miss it though. I'd gather all this intel, pass it on to someone else, and know that someone else was risking their life. Not the best feeling."_

_She nodded understandingly. Silence fell again. Then..._

_"I'll get there," she said confidently. "I think things'll be very different once I get out there. Then I'll really 'mean' it. People's lives will depend on it. Until then..." She shrugged. "Until then it's just a punchbag, we're just sparring, and the instructors aren't the 'bad guys'. Once I'm on duty, I'll mean it."_

_She smiled down at him, and stood up fluidly. "I'm sorry about your friend." Then she left the ring, and returned to the punchbag._

_"Me too," Brandt said quietly. He watched as Locke kicked the punchbag so hard the chains holding it to the ceiling creaked ominously, and smiled. He had every faith in her._

_A few weeks later, she passed her last test, and changed her name again: Agent Emma Hume._

* * *

**RE-EDIT: Aug 10th 2012**


	2. Chapter 2

**ANOTHER NAME**

* * *

PART II

* * *

Brandt woke with a jolt. God damn turbulence. He was stretched across the bench, every limb feeling tight from sleeping so stiffly. On the bench opposite was one of the medics, dozing. He peered over to check the other was awake: he was reading _Total Film _magazine.

Groaning at the click in his neck, Brandt sat up, stretched, and stood. With the floor of the plane vibrating under his feet, he carefully made his way down the plane, and finally forced himself to look at his protege.

Luther was right. Agent Hume had been dragged through hell.

"We got the bullet out of her shoulder, not too many fragments to fish out," the medic told him, looking up from his magazine. "She'll feel pretty sick when she wakes up, from the concussion, and she'll need to stay in ICU when we land, have a look in the MRI too. We're hoping her leg will be fine, we'll have to see how she heals up. As for the ribs, well... they'll hurt like a bitch for a while, she'll be doped up on painkillers for a bit, but they'll heal too. She'll get better, essentially, just have to see how much. She won't be back on duty for a long time yet though, and my bet is that she'll have problems with that shoulder for the rest of her life, nasty shot that was -"

"Right, thanks, err..." Brandt interrupted. "When was she last conscious?"

"Just before we put her on the plane. Agent Stickell tried to get her talking, but I don't think she said anything. We think her head's alright though, despite the messy bump she got from the crash. She understood us just fine, and apparently she spoke coherently enough when she was fished out of the car, and she was nodding earlier. Hopefully she won't wake up until after we land though, 'cos the turbulence will hurt if she does, don't really want to dose her up again."

Brandt nodded, hearing and not hearing. The medic chewed his lip awkwardly. "Look, do you mind keeping an eye on her? I really need to take a leak." Brandt nodded again. The moment the medic was gone, he finally let out the breath he didn't realise he was holding.

Her face was a mess of deep scratches and stitches. The side of her head had been bandaged up from a gun shot that scrapped her scalp, and her hair was crusty with blood. Almost her entire left cheek was bruised purple. Her left shoulder was bandaged too, and she was lying on her side to keep it elevated. Her left leg was also casted up from her ankle to her knee, carefully elevated too. Her arms were scratched and dotted with cuts, and her knuckles on both hands were raw. Every inch of skin that he could see was bruised or cut or scratched or broken.

With the same horror at what he saw clashed pride. She'd made it back alive. He thought she'd meet the same fate he'd once thought Julia Hunt had met years ago in Croatia.

Maybe he was getting old, but he hated that pride. Every time he looked at her, she was so young and so small. She shouldn't have been dragged through this hell.

He slowly kneeled so he was level with the stretcher, and reached out his hand to hers. He ran the tips of his fingers just below her bloodied knuckles and marvelled at how much larger his hands were compared to hers. Her hands still fit into kids' gloves. They weren't meant to be fists to beat danger into submission, her fingers shouldn't curl round the trigger of a gun.

He tucked a stray hair behind her ear and grimaced as dried blood came off on his fingers. With that he stood, just as the medic came back, humming under his breath.

Brandt went and sat back down at the front. He didn't want to look at her again until she didn't look like that.

* * *

_"Benji, are you sure about this? And this time, don't say 'pretty sure', just say 'yes' or 'no'."_

_"Brandt, William, Will -"_

_"Brandt, just Brandt."_

_"Okay, Brandt, this isn't exactly new tech we're dealing with. People have been doing halo-jumps since the Cold War."_

_"Exactly. Are you sure about this?"_

_"Brandt, I know you don't have the best history with heights, but -"_

_"Benji!" Agent Dunn finally shut up. "Yes or no?"_

_Silence. "Y...yes."_

_Agent Hume, who'd been listening over the comm with bemusement, wandered calmly to the edge, took some deep breaths, and waited for the light to go green on her first mission. Beneath her stretched black infinity, with a few scatterings of orange lights in the distance. It was just before midnight, and they were flying over the Milford Sounds. Their mission, as they had accepted it, was to bring in a hostile asset who was holed up in the Southern Alps. The location was perfect: no one would notice a bomb-maker disappearing from his ski-hut in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand, and no one would suspect the noise of the plane: people did flight tours and skydives over the Sounds all the time. They'd have had more trouble if the asset had stayed in Wellington._

_"Brandt, this isn't a twenty-five foot drop into a turbine, or hanging off the tallest building in the world, it's just -"_

_"We're entering the DZ!" The pilot yelled over the comm, and the light went green._

_"- haven't you ever gone sky-diving before?"_

_"Boss."_

_Brandt turned to Agent Hume and nodded at her summons. He joined her at the edge of the deck, and peered into the dark as his gear was checked. A helmet was plonked over his head, and the noisy plane dulled around his ears._

_"Code-names from now on. Comms check. Hobbit?"_

_"Honestly, why did I have to be Hobbit? I wish I hadn't come up with these now," Benji whined in their ears. Before Hume's helmet was put on, Brandt spotted her grin._

_"Elf?"_

_"Loud and clear, Wizard." She shook her head, her eyes still crinkled with amusement._

_"Smaug, how long have we got?"_

_"Ten seconds before we're out of the DZ!" The pilot warned._

_And with that, Brandt and Hume sprinted to the edge of the deck, and jumped._

_Oh shit..._

_For a minute that he couldn't count, there was just the darkness they'd jumped into. It was even worse than jumping into the computer relay, at least that was just a second at best. This just ticked by as Benji counted down their altitude over the comm. Straight as an arrow, Brandt couldn't move, could only hurtle towards an earth he couldn't see._

_"I didn't think you were afraid of heights," Hume commented over the comm._

_He chuckled despite himself, glad for the distraction from Benji's countdown. Now he sympathised with Ethan. "I'm not. I'm just wondering what's going to go wrong with my chute."_

_There was silence. "Well, that's a reassuring thought."_

_"Okay, guys," Benji alerted them, "3, 2, 1, deploy chutes!"_

_The jerk from the sudden deceleration was awful, but given that he'd just seen the tops of trees, he'd take that over hitting the ground. Too soon after that jerk however the floor was under his feet, and he instinctively rolled, trying to slow himself down further. He mis-calculated, and rolled into a bush._

_"That was elegant."_

_He yanked his helmet off, peered into the dark before pulling on his infra-red goggles. Hume was kneeling only a few feet away from him, helmet off, goggles on, silenced pistol at the ready, her chute already dealt with. She gave him a hand out of the bush, and kept an eye out as he pressed the yellow button on his parachute. He felt, rather than saw, his parachute sucking itself back into its pack on his back, solving the problem of how to get rid of the parachute after they'd landed without leaving evidence of their jump. He didn't think he'd be using it again however. Or at least, he really hoped not._

_"Let's move out."_

* * *

Brandt finally got back to his apartment at four pm, but he felt so tired it might as well have been four am. As an agent, jet lag was something one got used to by getting busy. In this case, he'd had nothing to focus on. There was no mission per se. He'd simply flown to Thailand and flown back again, and slept badly along the way.

An hour ago he'd watched as the IMF's medical team rolled Agent Hume away. Just before they had landed, she seemed to regain consciousness, and the agony of her injuries being jolted about as the plane descended had made her grip the stretcher's edge until her red knuckles turned white with the strain. The medic on duty swore as he measured out more morphine. Brandt darted down the fuselage, unable to listen to her agonised moans, grabbed her hands, told her she was fine and almost home, and tried not to wince as her fists gripped his fingers until they felt like they'd fall off. He carried on saying soothing non-sensities to her, wiping tears from her face as she couldn't hold them back, until the morphine soothed her for him.

As she lost consciousness again, he was pretty certain she tried to say something. Some garbled sentence. And his name. Will. Not Brandt. He stayed with her until the pilot told him they were landing.

He grabbed a bottle of scotch from the cupboard, didn't bother getting a glass and took a gulp, and another. He left the open bottle on the kitchen counter, wandered through to the bathroom and ran the water for the shower. As the shower steamed up, he stared at his hands. Her fingernails had dug into his hands so much they'd left scratches, and he still had her dried blood on his fingers from when he'd stroked her hair.

He'd hoped that the shower would make him feel a bit more refreshed, or at least cleaner, so he could go to bed and sleep better. Instead, when he finally let his head sink into his pillow, he had to grip the edge of his own bed to stop himself from letting the tension overwhelm him.

An uncontrolled, choking sob escaped from his chest before he swallowed the rest down. It should have been him. He'd volunteered. It should have been him.

* * *

_Nico Tannin was pretty sure he saw something. He should have left a light on against the pitch black, so it wasn't just the glow of his laptop creating the shadows in the room. He got up, reached for the light switch. Nothing._

_Finally, he noticed that his laptop had switched to its battery power, 14% ago. He'd been quite swept up in entertaining himself._

_Swearing at the power cut, the situation finally dawned to him. He reached for his shotgun, and felt his way to the centre of the room, guided only by the glare of the video he'd been watching on his laptop. He cocked the gun ready, and waited for 'them' to come, checking the open door to the main room and the window._

_Agent Brandt, having checked the perimeter, the rest of the ski-hut, and cut the power, was waiting at the edge of the door frame, watching through his colleague's eyes on his watch._

_Agent Hume was hanging upside down from the beams above Tannin's head, legs curled round the thick oak, balancing carefully, waiting for Tannin to move just a bit closer._

_A kiwi squeaked outside, and Tannin lost his nerve. "Come on, you devils!" And he backed up on his bed, clumsily pushing his laptop to the floor._

_Perfect. Hume reached down ever so carefully, and, with one gloved finger, stroked the back of Tannin's neck. He didn't seem to notice, merely twitched a little at the barely noticeable contact, thinking it was an itch. Agent Hume started counting. She hadn't even reached ten when Tannin collapsed, legs turned to jelly, slobbering a little, and Brandt darted forward to stop Tannin from hitting his head on the floor._

_So far, Benji's arsenal of miscellaneous gadgetry was working alright. The highly sensitive nerve agent she'd just used had worked like a charm. She dropped down from the ceiling and checked Tannin's eye movement, his pulse, his breathing, and gave him a gentle slap across the face. Yep, he wasn't waking up. "Potion worked, Wizard."_

_Brandt rolled his eyes amusedly. "Nicely done," he complimented._

_She grinned in acceptance. "Hobbit, how long have we got to get the Orc to the pick-up zone?"_

_"Twenty-two minutes," Benji answered. "Erm, there is a slight wrinkle."_

_Brandt froze. "What wrinkle?"_

_"Well, you know they adapted the hook so it could take three people -"_

_"Benji..." Brandt warned, forgetting to call him Hobbit._

_"The hook's broken, it's only going to take one person."_

_Brandt hung his head. He knew something would go wrong. He heard Hume swear under her breath. That was a bit of a wrinkle._

_"Okay, new plan then," Brandt said clearly. "Elf, help me get the Orc ready for transport. Then make your way to the abort rendezvous. Understood?"_

_Hume blinked for a second, and then nodded, her face firm. "Understood."_

_"Alright. Hobbit, get ready to accept the Orc in twenty-two, take him back to Minas Tirith. Do you copy?"_

_Benji remained silent for a moment. "Copy, Wizard. See you in Rivendale."_

_Brandt shook his head. On the long flight from Los Angeles to Auckland after accepting their missions, all Benji had been able to say was how much he wanted to do a Lord of the Rings tour. Geek. "Understood. After the Orc is en route, keep radio silence until the rendezvous. I have a bad feeling about this." With that he yanked Tannin up. "Elf, you ready?"_

_Before he even finished asking she darted to them and started yanking them towards the door, eyes wide. "Wizard, Helm's Deep is about to blow."_

_For a split second he had no idea what she was talking about - there was no Helm's Deep in their coding - until his brain registered 'about to blow', and was dashing to the door with her, dragging the limp Tannin with them, and were moving away from the house as quickly as they could, both wishing Tannin was shorter and lighter._

_Then the hut exploded._

* * *

"There's a rumour that you quit the field again."

Brandt frowned. He wondered why Ethan had called to meet for a drink.

They were in a bar not too far from the Virginia Department of Transport, in a booth in the corner for privacy. In typical IMF fashion, one sat facing the entrance, the other the fire escape. Brandt hadn't seen nor heard directly from Special Agent Ethan Hunt in over a year, the inevitable result of both working on very different things.

If it had been about work, there were plenty of places to have private conversations at IMF. This conversation obviously wasn't going to be so formal.

"That's an interesting one," Brandt commented quietly.

Ethan nodded, his poker face smiling. Brandt kept his face carefully composed, waiting to see where this conversation was going. "There is another rumour, but we'll get to that in a moment." He sat forward. "You haven't been in the field in over six months, not since England."

Brandt's jaw clenched as he tried not to react. England was something of a sore point for them both. "I'm a strategist, Ethan, I don't have to lead the teams any more."

Ethan nodded, allowing the point. "But most strategists don't have a six month dry spell, they all itch to lead again." His eyes twinkled from the very thought of the adrenaline rush. "You're no exception, I'd say."

Brandt looked away. "The missions I signed away have all been successful, they didn't need -"

"The other rumour," Ethan interrupted, "is that you quit the field after Agent Hume was nearly killed in action in Thailand."

Silence fell. Brandt had nothing to say, or rather, plenty to say, but nothing he thought was wise to say on that subject, particularly to Ethan.

"She wasn't your responsibility, Brandt," Ethan told him quietly. "I came up with that mission, and I passed it on to her. None of my team could do it; Hobbes was on to all of us, it was like he could smell us. It had to be someone new, someone fresh, someone _good_. I sent her alone because if she got caught, anyone working with her would have been compromised. You've read the report, you know what Hobbes' team is like." He sighed. "I don't know about you, but if it had been me, I'd probably have been killed."

The corner of Brandt's mouth twitched, for pride for Hume, but otherwise he remained blank.

"Do you have... feelings for Agent Hume?" Ethan asked, uncomfortably.

Brandt finally reacted, shocked. "_What_?"

Ethan shrugged. "That's the rumour, Brandt. That you quit the field because the woman you're in love with nearly died on a mission you briefed her on."

Brandt stared at him, aghast. "That's insane!"

"Is it?" Ethan cocked his head to the side. "I quit the field to teach when I met Julia. Declan and Zhen retired after they got together. Benji's just met someone, he's thinking about taking a research post back in Technical."

"I don't..." Brandt spluttered into silence, unable to complete his sentence. "I don't have... feelings for Emma!"

Ethan took one look at Brandt's face, noting his use of her first name. "Liar."

Brandt stared at him in shock.

"One of my first trainees I took on after I quit the field was Lindsay Farris," Ethan recounted to him. Brandt's look of shock slowly dissolved. He knew of Agent Farris, and her sad fate. "She was one of the best young agents I'd ever seen. If she was alive today..." Ethan trailed off. What if's were no more good for IMF agents than they were for anyone else. "We were very close, she was... she was like my little sister. I returned to the field after she was kidnapped, and returned for good after she was killed. I cared about her very much."

Brandt swallowed uncomfortably, sympathising.

"It's alright to care," Ethan told him softly.

Brandt hung his head, suddenly tired, and nodded weakly. Then he frowned, and shook his head. "No, it's not alright."

* * *

_Brandt and Hume stared over their shoulders at the burning wreckage of the ski-hut. Then Brandt turned to Hume, frowning. "How did you...?"_

_She turned away from the house and started leading the way, pulling the limp Tannin with her. "Next to the porn vid on his laptop was a snooze button with a log in." She shrugged as much as she could carrying the bomb-maker's weight. "The little shit was bound to booby-trap the place."_

_Impressed, he met her pace. "Right."_

_"So much for a quiet in and out," she commented._

_He chuckled. "I don't remember the last 'quiet in and out' I had."_

_"Well, these missions are meant to be impossible."_

_Grinning at her quip, he peered over their shoulders again to the destroyed ski-hut, and started thinking fast. "Those flames are going to be seen for miles around. If not, then the smoke'll still be there in the morning, someone's bound to see it within the next few hours." He stopped. "Go on, get a head start. I'll take care of Tannin from here."_

_She frowned, surprised. "You're sure?"_

_He nodded, started taking Tannin off of her. "Yeah, best we split from here, just in case. I'll see you at the rendezvous, midnight."_

_She nodded too, helped him heave Tannin into a fireman's lift. "I'll bring my glass slippers."_

_And then she was off, disappearing almost instantly into the woods._

* * *

"She shouldn't be part of this."

Ethan frowned. He knew that guilt was a powerful motivator for Brandt, but not this kind of regret. This was just irrational.

"She shouldn't be part of this world. Our world. She's..." Brandt smiled sadly. "She's too nice for it."

Ethan smiled at the compliment to Hume. "She found us," he reminded.

"And that was a really dumbass thing to do," Brandt countered, lifting his head sternly. "She didn't know what she was getting into."

Ethan nodded. "No, she didn't. But she knew that too. We warned her that it would be tougher than expected. She prepared herself."

"Fat lot of good it did her," Brandt said sourly. Ethan frowned again, not knowing where this was going. Brandt sunk his head into his hand. "Physical cleared her a month ago, all healed up. I even added her to a mission I'd been working on. I was even going to lead, go back to the field." He took a deep breath. "Psych said she wasn't fit for duty yet. And two weeks ago she almost garrotted one of the nurses after a bad dream." He picked up his scotch and downed it, wincing at its strength. "So no, it's not alright."

* * *

_Emergency packs really were life-savers. After watching the plane hook Tannin up and fly away with his still unconscious body, and the trek to Milford Sound, the New Zealand dollars he had on him bought a bus ticket to Queenstown, and inside the pack was a spare t-shirt rolled up. He dumped his parachute into a dumpster about to be emptied by the rubbish collectors, and he stowed his Glock into his boot, pulling his combats over. Reversing his jacket so it looked like a fleece, he passed for a hiker, albeit a hard-core one._

_It was a long drive to Queenstown. It was a shorter distance to fly, only forty miles, but the route along Highway 94 - the only road to and from Milford Sound - would take just under six hours, ignoring traffic. He had plenty of time._

_He half expected to see Hume on the same bus, it was the first one leaving Milford Sound. If she wasn't on it, he wondered how she was going to get to Queenstown. It was too far to hike to by midnight, particularly without rations._

_At Queenstown he had a shower, bought a black shirt, expensive jeans and smart shoes, unable to spot anything decent on the nearby washing lines. Queenstown was a backpacker haven, so he enjoyed being a tourist: he ate a Fergburger, got chatting to some twenty-somethings in the queue and found himself invited to a pub crawl. He agreed, making up some story about meeting his girlfriend at the club at the end of the pub crawl once she'd arrived in Queenstown from Christchurch._

_By the time the pub crawl had gotten to World Bar, his new friends were too drunk to really remember him too much. World Bar was heaving with people, mostly teenage or twenty-something backpackers, and a few local predators. Few people had the same accents: it was a cauldron of British, French, German, Italian, Swedish, American, Australian twangs before you even heard a local or Kiwi accent: 'World' was an apt name._

_He circulated the room, and, certain that he was surrounded by the harmless and the drunk, headed to the bar for a drink._

_And there she was._

_Her face was made-up, with heavy turquoise eyeliner and sparkling lip-gloss. She was in a black bra, and a slashed strapless top that shamelessly revealed nearly every inch of her skin, until a short shirt did nothing more than hug her ass, a pair of high-heeled ankle boots finishing off the effect._

_No wonder she was being hit on._

_"Look Darren, I'm just waiting for my boyfriend," she lied, yelling over the music to the poor schmuck who thought he had a shot with her._

_Darren, the guy, smirked. "And where is he, this 'boyfriend'?"_

_"Hey, babe," Brandt imposed smoothly, sliding himself in between Hume and the predator. "Want a drink?"_

_The relief that appeared on Hume's face was unmistakeable. Then she just grinned seductively, playing along. "Hey." She leaned into him, ignoring Darren's protests. "Missed you."_

_And then her hand was in his hair, pulling him towards her, and..._

_Oh God._

_He kissed her back, pulling her close, half of his brain telling him to play along, the other half... the other half had given in to instinct. As the player behind him continued to bitch about his loss to his friends, Brandt allowed himself to surrender to how good Emma felt in his arms. Her lips were moving in sync with his, her body pressed against his, her arms round his neck, his hands low on her back, itching to slid over her ass. Finally Darren shut up, seemingly done, and Emma pulled back barely a centimetre, breathing hard. Her hands stayed on his shoulders, her nose pressed against his. "Wanna get out of here?" He breathed. He felt her smile against his lips and she nodded slightly. "Okay."_

_As if knowing he'd never get his chance again, he kissed her once more, hoping she'd play along thinking it was their cover. Finally he let her go, took her hand, and led the way to the exit._

_"Oh what, you're going now?" Darren spat at them. They ignored him, until he grabbed Hume's arm and yanked her back. "Hey! I was talking to you, bitch -"_

_The split second as Brandt turned, his face angry with indignation to deal with the scumbag giving them trouble, Hume's hand vanished from his, fisted, and slammed into the guy's face. The force of it slammed him into the bar behind, and he slowly collapsed into a heap on the floor as his balance gave up on him, utterly dazed. His friends gawped in shock._

_"Run!" Hume squealed, grabbing Brandt's hand and pulled him through the crowd to the exit, laughing from the adrenaline. They burst through the doors, apologised in giggles to the bouncers, and stumbled down the street, his arm over her shoulders, hers around his waist, leaning on each other, grinning. They turned round the corner, and instead of letting go, now out of sight, she whooped with victory. "I meant it!"_

_Brandt frowned at her with amusement, confused, and then remembered her instructors' advice on combat. He burst out laughing too. "Told you you would."_

_She grinned up at him. He squeezed her shoulder affectionately, and started leading the way to the car waiting for them. They paused once, so she could take her heels off. He focussed on getting them home. If he didn't, he knew he'd do something stupid._

_His lips felt bruised, still sensitised. He wondered if she still felt him on her lips too._


	3. Chapter 3

**ANOTHER NAME**

* * *

PART III

* * *

When Hume's psychiatrist finally cleared her for active duty, Brandt finally returned to the field. He missed her first day back at IMF headquarters; he was on a mission in Hong Kong. When he got back, all he heard about her from his colleagues was that she had 'changed'. She finally gave her report of the Bangkok mission to Director Brassel, and then disappeared to the gym, waiting for the next mission. Other than for her report, she barely said a word to anyone. Brandt kept out of her way. If she wanted to see him, she'd find him. She always did before.

But she didn't.

He spotted her in the gym once. He'd expected to find her pounding the punchbag with gusto, but instead she was practising Tai Chi, her eyes closed and face blank, trying to relax as recommended by her therapists. Her face was shadowed and pale from lack of sleep, and her collar bones jutted out, making the scar on her shoulder all the more obvious. She seemed to test her left leg first before putting too much weight on it, but always seemed to balance perfectly well. She was looking thinner, and sleep deprived, but otherwise she was physically in one piece, and had been for months.

She froze, sensing him at the door, and didn't react. Didn't smile, didn't move. She just looked... hostile. Resentful even. She was not healed up.

Under the force of her coldly blank stare, Brandt nodded weakly and left. He didn't blame her. He hadn't exactly expected her to come back smiling, her usual self. The last time he had seen her was when he let her crush his hands from the pain of her injuries until she passed out. There was no going back to normal after that.

Not that there had been 'normal' before.

* * *

_"Comm check."_

_"Darwin's got you five-by-five, Hawking. Nothing on the horizon yet."_

_"Hawking, this is Newton. Gargoyles are in position."_

_"Einstein is ready. ETA two minutes."_

_Brandt - code named Hawking today - glanced around his surroundings. Five hours ago the heavens had opened and had not stopped raining over the remains of the monastery, and, standing in the centre of it without a roof, he was drenched. The only place that was remotely dry was the old bell tower, still more or less standing. At the top, hidden under the extremely rusty bells, was Benji - Einstein, this time much happier about his code name - carefully monitoring the images on his laptop from two different sources: satellite imaging, and radar. Their window for the satellite was short and was going to expire in a few minutes; as it was, it wasn't meant to be over their heads anyway. One of Benji's best tricks._

_Standing next to Brandt, also soaked from the rain, was Claire Gong, a mole in the IMF. With considerable reluctance, IMF was trading her for an asset with Gong's actual employers, the Syndicate, an international crime group with a finger in almost every illegal pie in the world. Special Agent Ethan Hunt - Newton - was somewhere around, leading his own team of 'Gargoyles' looking to intercept whoever the Syndicate sent that day. Hunt had been trying to crack the Syndicate for a few years now; he was eager for a fresh breakthrough. Thus, his own team were working separately, and Brandt had no idea who they were, where they were, or what they were doing. For all he knew, the 'Gargoyles' didn't even exist, but supposedly they could hear all of their comms, and Ethan was their go-between._

_The analyst in him knew that this was a recipe for disaster, having two teams and the left not knowing what the right was doing, never mind the very nature of the mission. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Hume had caught Agent Gong inserting a virus into one of the IMF servers, and less than an hour after that they received a phone call telling them to deliver Gong back in a remote location in Sussex, England the very next day. Before Brandt could stop him, Ethan was negotiating a swap for an asset no one knew anything about._

_Strategists plan. They pour over schematics, maps, supplies, equipment, personnel experience to create opportunities. The best were adaptable, to stop them from becoming control freaks. Brandt was relying entirely on being able to adapt today, because the only planning he'd done for this had been on the plane over. The last time he'd done that was on the plane to Mumbai, and he'd ended up dropping twenty-five feet towards a still-spinning turbine and very almost failed to prevent San Francisco from being obliterated in a nuclear mushroom cloud._

_They'd scrambled up the maps of Isfield Monastery, Ethan had given a few IDs for suspected Syndicate members that they might meet, a rough bunch, and told them his team was on their way. Benji flew in specially from another mission that he'd just wrapped on, bringing anything he could think of that might be useful, from the old to the new, keen to reunite with Ethan. The others had followed Ethan's example, and took their picks from the IMF Armoury._

_The plane journey was a drama in itself. Gong had escaped her shackles, how no one would ever figure out, but had tried to fight her way to the cockpit. She got Hunt in a choke hold, out of aim from Brandt. She forgot Hume, who broke Gong's fingers, releasing Hunt, and beat Gong to a pulp. The two men watched mesmerised as Gong seemingly forgot they were there, seeing only the bitch who'd not only caught her in the first place but had now broken her fingers. Hume, deathly calm and quiet, had barely needed to attack: she just flipped all of Gong's attacks round back on her, and finally delivered the last stroke: a full-on punch, followed by an elbow back in her face. Gong had slithered to the floor moaning after that, having had enough._

_Gong had been an IMF agent for over a decade. Hume had graduated from her training only a couple of months ago, and this was her third mission, her second with Agents Brandt and Dunn. And now, Hume was barely hit, and Gong was sporting a broken nose, a make-shift cast over her hand to keep her fingers from moving, and she looked utterly defeated. She'd even asked Brandt to kill her while they waited in the rain. "They'll only kill me after they're done anyway," she told him. Brandt just stared at her expressionlessly; sadly, he just didn't really care._

_"Hawking, I have a vehicle approaching from the __South West, a mile off," Darwin warned._

_Agent Hume - Darwin - was in the bell tower with Benji, taking advantage of the height - about two or three storeys up - to be able to see the entire terrain. She was trying to use the scope from her sniper rifle, checking the North, East, South and West in turn, but the rain was making visibility poor._

_"Hawking, Einstein confirms, I see two vehicles, SUVs, approaching on the satellite. The radar's just picked them up now too."_

_"Darwin, can you do a head count?" Newton asked._

_A pause. "Three in the first car, four in the second."_

_"Have you got eyeball on the prize?" Newton asked calmly._

_Another pause. "Negative, Newton, no faces." Benji suddenly swore behind her, forgetting the comm. "Einstein?"_

_"We just lost the satellite, relying on the radar now. And you, of course," Benji babbled slightly to Hume. Darwin smiled gently, keeping her eyes on the targets. She found his babbling endearing. __But her grip on the rifle tightened all the same. The pressure was on a little heavier, as if it wasn't enough already._

_Down below, Hawking kept his eyes on Gong, wondering if she knew what was progressing. Standing a few feet from her, he was silenced. His hands hadn't felt this tied since the Burj Khalifa._

_He had a bad feeling about this._

* * *

She hadn't accepted.

Brandt was on his way to New Mexico with unfamiliar faces. They were familiar in that he'd picked them from a roster because they were recommended, but unfamiliar in that he'd never actually met any of them before. Even Benji wasn't around.

It had been over two years since the Hobbes mission. Agent Hume was still around, still alive. Shortly after he'd bumped into her at the gym, she'd disappeared for nearly a year. Rumour had it she'd left a note at her apartment saying 'leave me alone', and that she'd gone rogue. Brandt did know that he'd been asked to set up a team to follow her; he'd declined. He did keep tabs on the team that did track her however, and once overheard them discussing why it was so easy to follow her. He told them she probably didn't care if they knew where she was; if she wanted, she could have vanished entirely, and even they would have trouble finding her ever again.

Then finally she returned. Reports said she was seemingly a lot better than she had been a year before, fresh out of the psychiatric ward, but that she was purely professional. She didn't discuss where she had been, didn't really talk to anyone. The only person she seemed to have gone out of her way to speak to was Benji, who told Brandt that she'd grown older, and that she pointblank refused to talk about Bangkok. That didn't surprise either of them. What did surprise them was that she didn't reunite with Brandt.

Brandt had long since returned to the field, but had avoided assigning Hume to his teams. The Hobbes mission was by now legendary anyway, so undoubtedly she was always in high demand. Once he could have done with her skills... but chose someone else instead anyway. Agent Hume hadn't spoken to him, not once, in all these months.

This mission - to protect the Rabbit's Foot as it was transported from its current home in IMF's research lab to a secret location and oversee its destruction - was simple enough, though potentially complicated if they actually ran into any trouble. It was a non-stop drive from Virginia to New Mexico, two cars, three people per car, driving, observing and resting in shifts. It would have been nice if she had accepted; they could have tried to repair their friendship along the way as they took turns to drive.

But, after sending out the mission invitation, she finally turned up at his office, and finally spoke to him: "No." And left. She didn't even look at him.

And now he was stuck on a road trip with people he didn't know, taking it in turns to drive and sleep between the two cars, plus changing vehicles along the way to avoid a tail. He actually missed Benji's babbling.

Benji had taken a job in IMF's research tech department, and, lured by the charms of being around the gadgetry that he felt so confident with, the chance of settling down with his new girlfriend - 'The One' as Benji actually called her, Raquel to everyone else - and the bonus of not getting shot at any more, Brandt couldn't blame him for taking it. He envied him, envied Benji for still believing in 'The One'. 'The One' also happened to be an IMF pathologist, so they both understood the need for secrecy regarding their work. Brandt envied Benji that too. Relationships were complicated enough for everyone: IMF ones would always be even less simple. The more complications you could take out of the equation, the better.

Brandt wasn't surprised to miss Benji. Agent Dunn was extremely annoying at the best of times, but bless him, he was surprisingly stable, and he was unquestioningly loyal: two of the most valued attributes of an IMF agent. Over the years Brandt had come to trust Benji considerably. Brandt was not the type to need confidants, about his professional or his personal, but he did consider Benji a friend. When Benji had confided in him about 'The One', Brandt had been sincerely pleased for him. The same could not be said for the reverse: Brandt kept his own life to himself.

On a car journey from Queenstown to Christchurch to fly home over two years ago, Emma Hume had become the only person he'd felt like talking to about his life.

The world had changed somewhere along the lines. People had grown older, and re-prioritised, or had, like in the case of Jane Carter, died before she could quit in time. How long would it be before Brandt went the same way?

A comm check sounded in his ear, confirming that the coast was still clear. Brandt couldn't be certain, but he believed that this was one of many different transport teams ensuring the Rabbit's Foot got to New Mexico. The package they had may well have been the Rabbit's Foot, or was just a decoy. It's how he would plan it, if he'd been given the chance. The strategy had been given to him, he'd just had to pick his team, much to his chargrin.

Not for the first time, and he wouldn't have been the first nor the last to, he wondered what in the hell the Rabbit's Foot was, and whether it was really worth all of this. And then he concentrated on the road ahead, and his mission. His curiosity wasn't as strong as Hume's.

If she still was curious.

* * *

_"What the hell happened out there, Ethan?"_

_The mission had unravelled very quickly._

_Ethan's asset, who'd emerged from the trunk of the rear SUV, and Gong had switched places, and Brandt was surprised to find that the asset was no other than Luther Stickell, nursing a limp and a few bruises and a big grin at the sight of him. The grin vanished when he saw Gong, and understood in a flash was had happened, and what was happening._

_"Hawking, they've got an effing grenade launcher," Hume warned in Brandt's ear. "This is going to get -"_

_Messy._

_No one knew who fired first, but the 'Gargoyles', perched on every advantage point in the monastery, opened fire, and Brandt grabbed Stickell and dragged the limping man to cover. Then there was the deafeningly loud and echoing lightening bolt of the sniper, instantaneously accompanied by the horrible sound of blood and bone exploding behind them. Brandt looked over his shoulder, and saw Gong, her face barely recognisable from the impact of Hume's shot, and an automatic pistol in her hand, still pointing in his direction._

_Brandt had a single moment to be completely shocked - Emma had just saved his life again - before returning to earth. The Syndicate's representatives were fleeing in a single vehicle, dead bodies around the other._

_"Darwin, get a plate number off that car!" Brandt ordered, knowing that Hume was probably the only one who could see that far and so clearly._

_The hissing shriek of an incoming grenade being fired at the tower was his only answer, and the top of the ruined tower burst apart in showers of stone and flame. Brandt and Stickell ducked as the pieces of debris rained down on them._

_Finally there was silence as the gunfire ceased. "Darwin? Einstein? Do you copy?" Brandt asked nervously. Still silence. He started towards the tower, ignoring Stickell's advice not to. "Einstein, this is Hawking, do you copy?" Still nothing. Part of the tower collapsed further in on itself, crumbling as it fell. "Emma...?"_

_And then Brandt was sprinting towards the ruins, Ethan's voice yelling at him to stop and help them chase after the Syndicate. Brandt ignored him. He scrambled over the wreckage, through the still standing doorway on the ground floor, the only part of the tower still in one piece. Inside was dust and rubble. And..._

_"Wizard...?"_

_Tucked on what was left of the level above was Hume, crouched down by Benji's limp figure. Brandt started towards the stairs, but she put a hand up to stop him. "I wouldn't test the stairs right now." Her voice wasn't quite normal, slurred. "My ears are ringing, can barely hear a thing."_

_"It's okay," Brandt called to her clearly, hoping she could lip read well enough. "Are you alright?" She nodded. "And Benji?"_

_She shook her head. "Hit his head, we had to jump down a level, didn't work out so well for him. He's breathing though, I think he's okay." __Benji moaned, as though to confirm he was still amongst the living. Hume didn't react; her eyes were on Brandt, and she couldn't hear anyway. "The car had no license plates, by the way."_

_It was raining so hard they were both getting as soaked as Brandt, now that the ceiling lay in rubble below them, and the rain was making the flaming wreckage hiss._

_Hume wondered whether she had ever imagined that it would be like this._

_The drive back to the safe house - a converted farmhouse - was quiet, save Benji testing his own hearing nervously. Brandt and Hunt both fumed at the front. Finally, Ethan broke the silence, just as he parked the car in the driveway._

_"So, does anyone want to assess what went wrong?" He asked, sarcastically icy._

_And then it all kicked off._

_Luther wondered aloud just what Ethan had been thinking, sending him undercover to spy on the Syndicate, only to blow his cover after he'd gotten caught under another alias. And what was he thinking swapping Luther for a mole they hadn't had time to interrogate. Brandt demanded to know whether it was one of Ethan's gargoyles that fired the first shot. Benji wanted to know what kind of people brought a grenade launcher to an asset swap. And Hume said nothing, just headed for the stairs, stopped only when Ethan berated her for killing Gong._

_"Would you have preferred that I let her kill Agents Stickell and Brandt?" She countered coldly, her face so icy it shut Ethan up, and no one said a word to her as she went upstairs, away from the raised voices, claiming the shower._

_The argument went nowhere. The mission had been a shambles. And all the while, the only thing that really angered Ethan was that Gong was dead._

_"Well, if you hadn't given her up, she'd still be at IMF, in a holding cell, safe and sound, waiting to be questioned!" Brandt had yelled him, his anger now at the edge._

_The two leaders glared at each other, neither with anything left they wanted to say. Brandt refused to let Hume take the fall for this. Not after..._

_Luther took over venting his frustrations at Ethan, and Brandt slipped away. He gave Benji a supporting pat on his shoulder, and went to check on Hume._

_He found her curled up like a foetus on one of the beds upstairs, fresh from the shower, her hair still damp, and her face stressed._

_"Hume...?"_

_"Yeah," she acknowledged, rubbing her eyes._

_"You okay?"_

_She nodded. "Just... umm..." She trailed off into a strangled silence._

_He sat on the bed across from her, leaning forward. This, sadly, was a common sight: new agents - some old ones even - in a state of shock after narrow escapes. He remembered his first time in combat under heavy fire, even before IMF, and the adrenaline shakes after. It was so uncomfortable, the itch to fight for your life, it was almost painful._

_She was so tense, every part of her clearly wired for action, and she was trying so hard to calm down. Her breathing was measured, her eyes stared resolutely at a single spot as though she was refusing herself to look away, her hands clenching to fists slowly, and straightening and stretching almost leisurely._

_She'd done good today. She'd saved both Brandt and Benji's lives. The last thing Benji remembered before hitting his head was Hume grabbing him as she yelled 'incoming', and yanked him to the stairs and forcing him to jump with her. If she hadn't noticed the grenade launcher being aimed at them, both of them would be dead, going home as ash._

_As for Brandt, it would have been a bullet through the back of his head. He knew of no way to thank her without sounding false. Besides, in their line of work, saving each other's lives was fairly common, meaning their slates were more or less kept even. He just hadn't expected to be the one indebted to her first and second. After Tannin in the Milford Sounds, Brandt always imagined that it would be him saving her next._

_"It wears off eventually," he told her gently, referring to the tension._

_She nodded, knowing that. But then she shook it slowly._

_"Gong was my first." Ah. Brandt sighed, now understanding exactly why she felt so uncomfortable in her own skin. He slid off the bed and kneeled at the edge of hers, his hand finding her forearm to squeeze soothingly. She smiled weakly, grateful for his understanding. She reached a hand up to his, squeezed his fingers, and frowned. "Jesus, Will, your hand's freezing..."_

_He frowned too, and then he realised how frozen to the bone he was, after standing in the rain for so long. She berated him lightly for not taking care of his wet clothes sooner, ordered him into the shower to warm up a little under the hot water, found him some dry clothes, and effectively switched places, him curled up in the bed, and her kneeling at his side. Feeling silly, and seeing the worry and stress remaining on her face, he tugged on her hand until she lay beside him, sharing the same pillow. _

_He told her about the first time he had to kill someone, before IMF, whilst on service in Afghanistan. He told her that there's no way to prepare someone for that reality, of knowing you ended a life. But eventually, all of them make their peace with it. They get back home, and they see the people they saved, good people just living their lives. They remember that the people they killed elected to be there, fighting. Even conscripted soldiers have the option of running away, of rejecting the wholly abnormal system of killing and dying that was war. People had always been in conflict for as long as human history could track, and as shit as it was, there wasn't a great deal they could do to change that. Maybe it was just hardwired into the collective consciousness of humans. So, for as long as people felt that insecure about their places in the world, the likes of he and Emma would choose to fight so others didn't have to get sucked into the system of war._

_Whilst telling himself that didn't make him feel great about the lives he'd ended, and never would, it did remind him why he stayed, why he fought._

_Finally did she seem to settle and calm, and she fell asleep before he did._

_The last thing he would remember going through his mind was that she'd called him 'Will'. She'd never used his first name before._

_Not long after Brandt fell asleep, his forehead barely an inch from hers, his arm loosely around her waist, Benji came up, looking to get some sleep too, and was struck silent at the sight before him. Were it not for the fact that both parties were still in their pyjamas, Benji would have thought all kinds of things. He did anyway, but he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut, and climbed into the other bed, turned his back to them, and went to sleep as best he could. The last thing Benji noted to himself about the two in the bed opposite was that their breathing was perfectly synchronised, in and out._

_Down below, Ethan and Luther quietly congratulated each other on a job that was far from over._

* * *

It was a dud.

After the initial irritation, Brandt realised it didn't really surprise him to learn that his team were one of half a dozen teams that left IMF supposedly with the Rabbit's Foot, and that all but his and the team carrying the genuine article had been attacked en route. The four teams that had been attacked had all be going to different locations, two to a post in Seattle and two across the border to Canada, whereas Brandt's team had arrived ahead of the actual Rabbit's Foot, that was due to arrive at their location shortly.

Seemingly just a ramshackle house in the middle of the desert, underneath it housed one of the treasures of IMF: an enormous network of facilities all researching the science and technology that kept them safe. It was said to be so large and so secretive that only a handful of people knew exactly what was there, geographically where it was, how many people were employed there in total. Brandt had known of the facility's existence, but knew nothing about what happened there. There were no rumours about the place, it was so well contained.

Whilst Brandt's team members reported in and made preparations to go their separate ways, Brandt wandered back outside to the surface, in search of fresh air that wasn't conditioned or purified or sanitised. Once he got out there he regretted the whim: the desert surrounding him in every direction was so dry the air could not exactly be described as 'fresh'. Right up to the hills there was nothing but dust and starving grass.

And a car in the distance.

Brandt eyed it carefully, doubting that it could be anyone but the Rabbit Foot's actual carrier. There was no road, just the tracks Brandt's own vehicles had left en route, and this car wasn't following those. As the car got closer, he could see there was only one person in it, driving. Risky, he thought, to have a one person transport team for such valuable goods, though in a way far easier to be stealthy. Brassel had bet big on this one.

And then he saw it was Agent Hume.

She pulled up, got out, taking her sunglasses off, dragged a sports bag off the passenger seat next to her, and walked briskly to the house, leaving the engine running.

"Agent Brandt, could you do me a favour?" She called out, almost conversationally, but urgently. It surprised him, to hear her speak so normally. "Could you get the car out of sight? I think I picked up a tail, should be about two miles behind, one car, four men. The keys are still in the ignition."

Swiftly, Brandt did what she asked, quickly finding the covered entrance round the back of the house, watching as sections of the earth and the wall of the house slid down and out to let him in quickly. There wasn't much they could do about concealing their tracks, though a machine was now blowing them out of the sand around the house. They were well hidden and safe; a nuclear warhead couldn't have reached the facility, it was designed to withstand anything.

Brandt finally caught up with Hume in the depths of the facility, and was just in time to see Hume witness the Rabbit's Foot being placed into a machine. He joined her at her side, and listened as the machine made all kinds of peculiar noises behind the fortified glass.

"Do you know what it is?" He asked her, curious.

She shook her head. "They didn't tell me. Brassel just told me to get here, so I got the jet, and drove from the airbase. I have a theory though..."

The machine stopped, made some satisfied beeping noises, and an engineer in biohazard protective clothing came out, checked the machine, and gave them a thumbs up through the glass. She nodded, and started to head out. She stopped at the door. "Would you like a lift back to IMF? I can tell you my theory on the way to the airport."

He smiled, and followed her. They walked in silence through the complex back to where her car now was, and before he could claim the driver's seat she was already in it, sunglasses back on, strapping on a holster for her glock, stuffing the glove compartment with spare mags. "We might need to fight our way out, depends on how far out the exit is from the entrance," she commented. "There's an M4 in the boot if you want it." He got the heavy gun out, bemused by her tone. It didn't feel so long ago since she took directions from him. He got in the passenger seat, started loading up as she started the car, pulled out of its space, and drove steadily towards the tunnel that ran towards their exit.

"I'm sorry."

He paused loading the M4 to stare at her. "For what?"

She took her sunglasses off, kept her eyes on the tunnel, her hands tight on the wheel. "I... I've been so pissed, ever since..." _Ever since Bangkok_. He lowered the M4 into his lap to listen to her properly, his attention undivided. "I'm sorry. I never had reason to be angry with you, but I was."

Brandt swallowed uncomfortably. "Yes, you did."

She finally looked at him. "No, I didn't," she asserted. "You didn't send me to Bangkok. It wasn't your mission, it wasn't your responsibility. I knew that. I always knew that. I was just..." She shrugged and turned back to the tunnel. "I was just angry. Really angry. But I didn't really want to take it out on you, because I knew you'd take it personally. So I... I tried to keep out of your way until I dealt with it." She turned back to him. "That's why I'm sorry. I should have trusted you better. I shouldn't have cut you out like that."

He slowly smiled at that. Silence fell between them, comfortable silence. The tunnel seemed never ending.

"So tell me," he said conversationally. "What's your theory?"

She glanced at him quickly, keeping her attention on the straight, wide tunnel. The corners of her mouth twitched upward in recognition of the change of subject, and the forgiveness that went with it, and put her sunglasses back on. "Did they tell you that I was bringing it?" She asked warily. He frowned, and nodded. She snorted derisively. "Brassel wouldn't let me bring the Rabbit's Foot, not alone." She shook her head. "Would you hand over a weapon that got the likes of Damian Owen itching to a solo agent?" He shook his head too, agreeing with her. He'd thought the same, but was glad that she was voicing it. "I reckon the Rabbit's Foot never left Virginia. They'd have found a way to get rid of it there, if they really wanted to, rather than send six teams of agents all across the continent. But this way, they get rid of some heat." She glanced at him again. "What do you think?"

He tried to see her eyes through her sunglasses, but couldn't see anything. So he shrugged. "I think if that's true, it's not worth our lives knowing."

The corner of her mouth twitched up. "Curiosity killed the cat, right?" She stared back ahead, saw the sunlight glaring up ahead, and turned back to him. "Glad to be back, Will."

She held up her hand, and he fist-bumped her, genuinely smiling. Words could not express how glad he was that she was back.

The world beckoned up ahead, and the two became agents again. He fished his own sunglasses out, put them on, and flexed his fingers over the M4. "Ready?" He asked her.

She grinned gamely, shifted the car into the next gear, accelerating. "As ever."

And then the sun was on them.


	4. Chapter 4

**ANOTHER NAME**

* * *

PART IV

* * *

Agent Emma Hume rose out of the sea like Aphrodite at her birth.

She walked up the golden sand, twisting her long, dark, wet hair into a knot, stretching her taut stomach and lifting her cleavage up tantalising.

_It's not for you, _Agent Brandt reminded himself. _You're working. So is she._

Their mark was sitting a few yards away with his latest conquest, watching the whole show. They needed to borrow his face for a few days, and take him back to the US to face trial for money laundering. His name was Massimo Arouet, an American of Italian and French descent, and he had a penchant for having affairs with married women. Around his neck were all the rings he'd stolen from his collection of adulteresses.

There was a rumour that he had a bracelet of teeth as well, from jealous husbands who'd picked a fight and lost to Arouet's mute bodyguard, but no one had confirmed that story yet.

Brandt twisted his wedding ring on his finger, unfamiliar with the feel of it. When Benji had issued it to him at IMF's tech division, he half expected it to feature a tracking device, or garrotting wire, or even an explosive device. Nope, Benji told him bemusedly, it was just a normal gold ring, as was Hume's, no different from the genuine article Benji sported with happy pride these days.

He held out his left hand to help his 'wife' sit down gracefully next to him on their beach towel. She smiled happily at him when he didn't let go of her hand, and squeezed his fingers gently.

After the years of estrangement, it was a relief to work with Emma again, a relief to find her mostly healed and still healing from her many scars, on the skin and deep below, and a relief that it felt so easy to play out this charade. It was only a few months since fighting their way out of the New Mexico facility together, her driving like a maniac across the dry terrain whilst he shot the wheels out of their tail, and they had both been busy. IMF agents didn't exactly Skype each other outside the office to catch up.

Despite his bizarre taste in jewellery, Arouet had very good taste in vacation spots: they were at the Royal Palm Hotel on the island of Mauritius. Arouet had kicked out the previous occupant of the Royal Suite, which cost nearly seven thousand dollars a night at peak time. Brandt and Hume were masquerading as newly-weds Mr and Mrs Byrd, he a Wall Street executive, and she a Manhattan socialite, the recent occupiers of one of the Garden suites, a stone's throw away from the two-storey Royal Suite. Before they'd even gotten off the plane, their fellow team members were already there, had linked them into the hotel's server, had set up cameras in and around the Royal Suite, placed some microphones in the suite itself, and hoped that Arouet wouldn't check, and if he did, that Benji's time in R&D had paid off.

Agents Seame and Thurar had arrived ahead of Arouet, the former undercover as a British playboy escaping a dull life of responsibility in the bars of Mauritius, and the latter employed as a waiter assigned to the night shift for the Royal Suite. Seame, in between flirting with anything that moved, was studying every last one of Arouet's mannerisms: it was he who was going to be borrowing Arouet's face after all.

It was Brandt and Hume's first full day at the Royal Palm Hotel, and already Hume had made quite an impression: the moment they checked in, Arouet swanned past with the concierge complaining about the breeze. The sight of Hume taking her sunglasses off and flicking her hair as she arrived in the hotel lobby on Brandt's arm had stopped him in his tracks, and Brandt heard him inquire who they were, who _she_ was. Another agent might have been proud that she was working her magic already; Brandt knew Hume better. She had initially refused the mission based purely on what she would have to do, 'whoring herself' as she put it. She only changed her mind when Brandt reminded her he'd be there the whole time, that he had her back. Someone else's pride would not make her feel any better about what she was doing. This wasn't what she had in mind when she scouted for a job at IMF five years ago.

Getting her assigned had been somewhat of a chore, which had surprised Brandt. Originally, trusting no one else more, he had selected her as his only female option. She had the potential to be Arouet's only weak point, as much as he'd prefer not to use this weakness, remembering Agent Carter's discomfort when she'd been seducing Brij Nath in Mumbai. His superiors at IMF had said no, and it had taken twisting a few metaphorical arms to change their minds. He knew however that if the mission sunk, he'd drown with her.

Good thing then that he trusted her completely.

'Mrs Byrd' passed him a bottle of sunblock, having spent the last few minutes smearing it into her arms, legs, stomach and chest, knowing that Arouet was watching every second of it. She seated herself between Brandt's knees, a dollop of sunblock in her hand to apply to her face, and Brandt both cursed and blessed the day he'd chosen Emma to do this. He savoured massaging the cream into her shoulders, smiling as she moaned contentedly, and spread it all the way down her back, tucking his hands under her bikini strap to not miss an inch of skin. Once done he scooted up closer to her and pressed a kiss into the crook of her neck, wrapping his arms round her comfortably. "Poor bastard," he commented quietly into her ear. She grinned, leaned back into him and reached back to kiss his temple.

Later, after he went to get more bottles of water from the bar, he came back to find Arouet had made his first move on his 'wife', and jealousy seethed through him before he could even check himself. She was on her front, her bikini strap open to avoid white strap marks, Arouet squatting to talk to her so she didn't have to lean up too much. Hume was playing innocent, unaware of Arouet's obvious intentions, but enamoured by the man's hybrid European accent which he was thickening more than it actually was. Arouet stood warily as Brandt approached, pretending to be naive and unconcerned, his attentions on his wife. Mrs Byrd told her husband all about how Mr Arouet had been recommending taking a boat out to explore the beaches and tiny islands around, and Mr Byrd thanked him, asked if he was staying at the Royal Palm and offered to buy him a drink, joking that if he didn't talk to someone else he and the wife would go stir-crazy, laughing stupidly at his own joke as his wife remained silent, glad that the very handsome Mr Arouet didn't find it funny either. Arouet did take them up at their offer however, and wandered away.

Hume took Brandt's hand and tugged lightly, silently asking him to sit beside her instead of glare after their mark. He remembered himself, smiled down at her and sat, accepting her into his arms as she reached up to kiss his cheek. "Hook," she whispered.

Her bikini was still undone, he realised as he ran his hands down her back, soothing his green tension. "Want me to do this up for you?" He teased, making her blush naturally with embarrassment.

Later that evening, Mrs Byrd entered the Royal Palm Hotel's bar alone, glittery with jewellery, dress flowing behind her, her husband watching the CCTV feed in Agent's Seame's suite. Agent Brandt listened over the comm as Hume told Arouet all about how she supposedly met Mr Byrd, how he had wooed her in a whirlwind romance, and that this was their first vacation together after their honeymoon had to be cancelled by the Wall Street protests. She sounded exactly like a woman hopelessly enamoured by her husband, believing absolutely that he was 'everything she wanted in a man', or some other bullshit.

And then Arouet started picking it all apart. He examined her diamond ring, her diamond earrings, leaning in. He told her oh-so-reluctantly that they were fake, planting the first seeds of doubt in Mrs Byrd's mind, all before Mr Byrd finally made his appearance, apologising for being late, work called. When he kissed his wife on the cheek in greeting, she did not react.

They ended up eating dinner, Mrs Byrd mostly silent as her husband talked with Arouet about business, politics of banking, and most uncomfortably, the worth of diamonds. Arouet was - publicly - a very successful diamond trader, so it wasn't too surprising that he talked about the little gems that made him worth so much. Not so publicly, though he certainly didn't mention this at dinner, he also laundered diamonds for known terrorist organisations, which is why IMF wanted him. In only a couple days, he was due to leave Mauritius to meet with some of his clients in Dubai. Rather than let him go, IMF was sending Agent Seame. Until then, Mrs Byrd was going to have to suffer Arouet's foot feeling her up under the table.

Later, after Arouet had bid them good night, he watched Mr and Mrs Byrd having a blazing row in their suite, forgetting to close the doors behind them. He smirked. Maybe Mrs Byrd was going to be easier than he thought. Then, instead of storming out after his wife furiously chucked her jewellery at him and run out of things to scream at him, Mr Byrd did something that made things a little less easy: he marched over and kissed his wife, almost violently kissed her, and didn't let go as she struggled until she succumbed. He wrapped his arms round her, lifting her off her feet, bunching her dress up as she wrapped her legs round his hips, and stumbled with her to the bed. He kissed his way down her front, and then wretched himself from her to close the doors, undoubtedly returning to his wife on the bed to ravish her some more.

Hmmm. Mrs Byrd wasn't going to be so easy after all.

Inside the suite, Brandt was shaking.

After that surreal dinner, as Brandt wondered just how much bullshit he could blag, he knew that his partner beside him was getting more and more uncomfortable. She kept glancing at him, supposedly guiltily, but he knew her better than that. He guessed Arouet was doing something under the table, sitting across from them, and gently held her hand, also under the table, letting her grip his fingers the more uncomfortable Arouet made her.

As they walked back to their suite, Agent Thurar told them they were being watched by the mark. Instantly Mrs Byrd turned to him and berated him for all of the crappy comments he'd made about her being boring through the day to everyone else, for being so late, for never being off his phone, for being more married to his job than to her. When they got to the suite, they deliberately left the doors open just a bit longer, Thurar telling them the mark was still watching. So she started on her tacky, fake diamonds, chucking them at him. As he pretended to fume at her, Hume shaking with the rage she was faking, Thurar confirmed that Arouet was still watching, and that they had two options: storm out, or make up.

Brandt chose the latter.

He wondered for a horrible moment whether she really meant it as she struggled, and that caving in after was pretend. She directed him in smothered whispers: _pick me up, bed, move south..._ Time had slowed, and what took place in less than a minute might as well have lasted an hour. Brandt didn't know what would have happened if he hadn't pulled himself away from her under the guise of giving them some privacy.

He collapsed in the corner as far away from her as possible, but couldn't take his eyes off her. Her chest was heaving, her lipstick gone, leaving swollen, red lips, her dress punched up around her thighs. She got her breath back, and spoke to their team for him. She told Thurar to keep an eye on their mark, and Seame that all was clear and he could sign off for the night. She then turned off the mic in her dress, and walked over to Brandt and turned his off too. She knelt before him, her knees between his, and gently leaned in to rest her forehead against his. With her finger tips on the sides of his face, Brandt sighed, the tension seeping out, and he reached up with both hands to hold on to her wrists.

The two remained connected like this for a long time, both calming down. Finally Emma pulled back to kiss his forehead. "Are we going to be okay?" She asked gently.

It was a question that asked a lot of things. But... he nodded. Yes. She kissed his forehead again, told him she was going to brush her teeth and get ready for bed, and gently let go of him.

Neither slept well.

The next day, aware that they were being followed by Arouet himself, even before a sleepy-sounding Thurar told him over the comm, the couple hired a jeep and drove round the island for the day. The bags under their eyes just made them look like a couple who'd spent far too much of the night making up, and the wariness between them only added to it. But regardless, they'd decided to go with 'hard-to-get', and so she was wearing one of Brandt's shirts over her bikini, tied up in a knot and a sarong tied round her hips. They gave no sign they had noticed Arouet's clumsy tracking as they bought local souvenirs, going for hand-made bead bracelets to replace the diamonds. When they got back to the hotel they 'bumped' into Arouet also arriving back, who invited them to dinner again. Reluctantly, they accepted, went and got ready, and instead of Brandt being late it was Hume's, swanning out in a cocktail dress that embraced her curves.

As Arouet piled on the compliments to Mrs Byrd, Brandt's green devil threatened to take hold, until Emma smiled at the compliments but took his hand and laced her fingers through his. Arouet was momentarily silenced by the gesture, but judging by the look on his face, he wasn't deterred. He just looked more hungry.

Over dinner, Brandt and Hume stuck to their plan, and as Arouet continued to pile on the charm on Mr Byrd's wife, Brandt finally got to let some of the jealous, possessive, protectiveness run on the outside. But Mrs Byrd was oblivious to her husband, enjoying the charm of their new vacation friend, so when Arouet asked her to dance, she didn't say no, ignoring her husband's disgruntled face.

And over the comm, Brandt heard every sordid, ear-burning thing Arouet whispered into her ear as he held her far too close, let his hands drift far too much, clearly dying to look back at Mr Byrd and smirk. Emma said nothing. But when they turned, she stared at Brandt desperately for help over Arouet's shoulder, her face tight with discomfort. Then she leaned back, her face changing in an instant to coyness for Arouet. "You shouldn't say such things, Massimo, what would my husband think?"

As the song ended, Brandt got out of his chair and headed over to them, not knowing who had had enough more, him or her. "May I claim my wife back?" He asked, all charm, laced with threat. Arouet, all charm too, stepped aside, watching over his shoulder at Mrs Byrd, vindicated to find her eyes were still on him, her face closed but eyes flaming.

It took all of Emma's will not to collapse into her partner's arms with relief as Brandt held her hand and wrapped his other round her waist, holding her almost rigidly, jealously, supposedly distrustfully. It was disconcerting, being unable to be closer, something that felt so natural after only a couple of days. But he was being watched, and he knew that they were running out of time. Sighing, Brandt lifted his hand to her cheek, making her meet his eyes. She lifted her own hand to cover his, and stepped away. "I'm tired, let's go back to the hotel."

Arouet looked disappointed that the show, his twisted little game was over so early, but joined them in the cab back to the hotel, sandwiching Mrs Byrd in the middle at the back of the car, tracing his fingers over the side of her exposed thigh, out of Mr Byrd's sight. Hume made every pretence of trying to not melt, swallowing down her actual feelings of revulsion. When they finally departed in the lobby, Hume held herself together long enough to get to their suite, for Brandt to shut the doors behind them before ripping off her jewellery, practically ripping her tight dress off as she told Brandt, her voice shaking, that she needed a shower, and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

When she came out, her skin pinking from being scrubbed a little vigorously with luffa, Brandt finally hugged her as tight as he had wanted to earlier, and she clung to him just as tight. "Please don't ever ask me to do something like this again," she whispered in his ear. He nodded in the crook of her neck. He had no intention of doing all of this again. Finally she pulled away, headed to her pillow where her pyjamas were. "Tomorrow," she reminded herself. "Tomorrow I get to kick his ass."

During the night, they would be glad that they kept up the wife-husband ruse at night: Arouet snuck into their room. He spent a long time staring over Mrs Byrd's sleeping form, ignoring Mr Byrd who slept beside her, turned towards her back. He gently touched Mrs Byrd's wedding ring, scoffed quietly to himself. Disturbed by the sound, Mrs Byrd turned over in her sleep, facing away from him, back towards her husband, who slept on too. With a last brush over her hair, Arouet left.

Emma opened her eyes as she heard the doors close again, met Brandt's worried stare. He shook his head, lifted his head slightly to check over her shoulder, and then nodded. Emma let out the breath she'd found herself holding on to. "God damn pervert," she whispered.

He smiled weakly. Finally he let go of his grip on the gun under his pillow, and enveloped Emma into his arms, her head resting on his chest.

They fell asleep like that, woke like that. Brandt wrote a note from 'your loving husband', telling Mrs Byrd that he'd gone back to the city, last minute meeting, and that he'd send their Manhattan driver to meet her at JFK. Arouet heard firstly from the concierge that Mr Byrd had checked himself out but that his wife would be staying, and then heard from Mrs Byrd herself at the poolside, sunglasses hiding red eyes, her husband's note scrunched up in a ball at her side. Arouet invited her for dinner in his suite that night, and with a coy, calculating look, Mrs Byrd accepted, already imagining her revenge on her husband for abandoning her on their vacation. _Line_, Hume thought to herself.

Whilst Arouet made arrangements with the concierge for dinner for two, other events occurred: a waiter spilt a Bloody Mary all over one of the hotel's other guests, and two almost got into a fight. The waiter was fired on the spot under pressure from the guest, and the guest checked out, threatening to tell all of his aristocratic friends to never visit the hotel. The guest - Agent Seame - actually vanished into the hotel's air ducts, and crawled through the building until he was above the ceiling of the Royal Suite, just in time for Mrs Byrd's entrance, dressed in virgin white. Within ten minutes, the bodyguard lost consciousness: he should never have let Mrs Byrd touch his hand, complimenting how good a job he did. Agent Thurar quickly took over his face, and was back at the door before anyone noticed, Brandt watching the actual CCTV feed, the looped one now ready to switch off back to live feed. He then gave Hume her signal, and, watching through Seame's goggles, grimaced as she approached her target, having had enough of games, pushed him on to the bed, and Brandt smiled as she pounced like the ninja she was. She had Arouet in a twist before he knew what was happening, face-down into the bed covers, the unmistakable feel of a silencer at his neck. A card was placed in front of his face, and he was coldly instructed to read it aloud. In a daze, his arm tightening uncomfortably behind his as she put more pressure on it, he skimmed the card before starting. What the...?

"The pleasure of Buzby's company is what I most enjoy... He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair when she called him a horrible boy... At the end of the month, he was swinging two kittens across the width of the room... I count on his schemes to reveal a way to escape my gloom."

And then Arouet would not remember a thing until he awoke on US soil, not that he would know that he was US soil for certain, because he wouldn't see the outside of the cell he occupied for a long, long time.

The dart in Hume's gun worked instantly the moment Brandt told her he had what he needed, and Seame dropped down lightly from the ceiling, face-mask already in place, frightening Hume so much he had to give her their safety password to confirm he wasn't actually Arouet, speaking in his own voice before Arouet's loaded up. She lowered the gun she'd instinctively raised, went back to the limp body of Arouet and turned him over. His face was frozen in shock still. She stared down at him for a moment, and before Seame could stop her, she backhanded the unconscious man on the bed. "Sinker," she spat at him.

Down at the beach, only a few metres away, a boat pulled up on the shore, and a team of blacked out men jumped out and snuck up the beach to the Royal Suite's ground level. Two bodies were smuggled out, along with a bag of disposed cameras and microphones, as the lights round the patio shorted out for a few seconds, and Mrs Byrd and Arouet came out themselves to tell the night-shift concierge that all was fine. Then Mrs Byrd bid Arouet good night, minus her wedding ring. She took a stroll down to the beach, dipped her feet into the water, and smiled as she felt welcome eyes watching her from the boat, already speeding off.

The next day, Mrs Byrd checked out of the Royal Palm Hotel, telling the concierge that she was going back to her husband. If anyone were to actually conduct a search of Mrs Byrd's wedding ring, it would never be found. Neither Arouet nor his doppelgänger ever attained possession of it.

As for Mr Byrd, watching the smuggle from the boat, he kept his ring.

* * *

_Twelve Years Later..._

Fiji is a country proud to be on the edge of the International Date Line, the one of the first countries to see the sun rise and wake to the new day. Nadi, a town on the West side of the main island Viti Levu, sees the dawn a fraction later than the capital of Suva, but that means the sun rises out of the island and sets in the sea.

Emily Jones was one of the first to wake, emerging from her house on the beach just as the sun started to sear through the palm trees to go for a run on the sand. She went as far as a backpackers' hostel a couple of miles away, grinned bemusedly at the young explorers still awake, chatting mellowly, passing round a spliff, and a few lovers emerging from the bushes to be cheered and laughed at by their friends. Emily smiled, remembering that nearly fifteen years ago it had been she who did the same, minus emerging from the bushes. Back then in her mid-twenties, dawn was a nightcap. Now, approaching forty, it was a morning coffee.

She turned and ran back.

Emily Jones owned and ran a scuba-diving experience company that operated out of Denarau Port outside of Nadi. Nearly fifteen years ago, on a gap year after finally completing her studies in the US, Emily met a group of Fijians looking to start their own company. After hearing about their passions for the water, the coral reefs, and scuba-diving, she paid for them all to take the necessary courses to get the right credentials; a gift for making her feel so welcome and so at peace, finally putting her inheritance to good use. Three years later, Jones returned, and, meeting them again, looking for investment, she gave them the capital they needed to start up. She found all the right contacts, created all the right business links, and they all reaped the profits, shared out fairly amongst all the small team.

Her business partners - friends - who knew her best in Fiji, had watched her grow older, no longer the young mid-twenties girl looking to grow up. They knew that she had been running from some trauma, but she had never, ever spoken of it. They did not speak of it. Whatever it had been that brought her to them the first time did not make her return. At twenty five, she had been shadowed, slowly lightening under the bask of the sun and calming influence of the local cava. At twenty-seven, the shadows were no longer within her, but clearly somewhere behind her, trailing still but failing to catch up. At twenty seven she became Fijian at heart, and had not called any other place in the world home. Every now and then she would disappear at the last minute, apologising but needed back in the States, family emergency.

When she was home, she got her hands dirty. She lead tours with them, left no task undone, and drank the earthy local drink cava with them in the evening. She was an aunt to their children, a friend to their wives.

For her thirtieth birthday, finally Emily's business partners saw the tiniest glimpse into her secretive life. A friend - a man - visited her to congratulate her 'for living this long', as he put it. He was an American like Emily, a few inches taller than her, but very muscular. She explained that her friend, Will, was in the US Marines, that normally his shore leave was so tightly packed with other matters he probably would not visit again for a very long time.

In the near ten years since, he hadn't visited once. Yet when thinking of Emily and her life, this man was always remembered.

She was asked once whether they were in love, and she had answered with regretful silence, and she revealed a sliver of her soul. "Will doesn't belong in this world. He belongs in the battlefield. Neither of us want to be the one waiting at home, hoping the other comes home safe and sound, or comes home at all."

When asked whether maybe it would be worth being the one waiting at home anyway, she smiled again. "He has his duty. I have mine." And then she closed up again.

He stayed with her for a few months, helped her build her house on the beach. They went running together, swam together. She took him out on the boats and showed him the reefs, went scuba-diving with him. They were invited to dinner together, turned up hand in hand. They cooked for friends, bickering like a married couple. They watched him - this Will - and saw how he was never far from Emily, was always taking care of her, letting her take care of him.

But they weren't together, she told them, content.

And then he left, as quickly as she always did. She was very quiet after that. It wasn't the same shadows as before, more like she had been emptied of spirit. But they noticed more and more that she came back happier, sadder and older after her trips away.

Now, as she approached her home, stretching, Agent Emma Hume stared at the home she'd built. Small and modest, for a house built by an American ex-pat in Fiji given some of the properties closer to Denarau, it was built on stilts over the beach so the tide would come in under the house. Consisting of a spacious main room with kitchen attached, there was a flight of stairs leading to the bedroom and open bathroom above, and both had balconies, the bedroom's built on top of the main room below. There was another flight of stairs connecting the two balconies, and all the furniture in the house was built locally, including the bench on the lower balcony that Agent Brandt had built for her from spare parts left behind by the builders. She loved that bench, it was her favourite spot in the house; every part of it was a different colour from the different sources it came from, and so she'd piled it with random cushions. Sitting in front of it was a cava bowl that they had looked for together, avoiding the tourist traps in Nadi town.

The dirt road from the house to the main road was a mile long, ending with the gangway to the front door. Her car, an RAV4, sat patiently waiting for the ride into town to work. As she got closer, the security perimeter Benji installed for her picked up her signature and sent her iPhone a message welcoming her home, telling her no one had approached the house whilst she was away. She knew better. There were tracks leading up to the house where a car had stopped, unloaded, and driven off. No one drove to the house, and even if they had, her security would have told her so.

She walked up the gangway to the door, leisurely, seemingly unsuspecting. She bent down to untie her shoes, and fished the glock out from under the boards. She entered the house quietly, the glock pointing the way, trying to note anything moved, anything gone. There was no difference anywhere. Adrenaline pumped hard. The only people who knew she was here were the people she trusted. And none of the people that she trusted had business coming here and tampering with her security system.

She didn't leave the balcony door open...

"It's just me."

She froze. It took her a full minute to recover herself, and she kept the glock up as she approached and finally pointed it at the intruder in her house.

Agent William Brandt stared at her from the bench he'd made for her ten years ago, not reacting at all. But her hands shook slightly, the only time they had in nearly two decade of wielding firearms. Not once in all these years had she ever needed to point a weapon at him. "What did you tell me to tell Patty?" She asked.

He smiled knowingly. Face and voice masks were far too normal for them. "Use more water, not more sugar."

She gasped for breath, the tension releasing from her body, and she let the glock drop to the floor. She studied him carefully, as though still not believing her eyes. "What happened to you?"

Agent Brandt stared at his leg, at the crutch leaning against the balcony edge. "I got shot," he told her. "Went straight through the bone, been stuck in the hospital for a while." She frowned. She hadn't known. "It'll never be the same, so..." He stared back up at her. "I'm retiring."

* * *

___Agent Brandt paced. It was noon, and the Mauritian sun was blasting down on him relentlessly, straight from above, giving him no shade to lie under. In the heat he could feel the sweat on his back, seeping through his shirt. But at least it was his own shirt now, not 'Mr Byrd's'. He felt a bit more like himself now, and was eagerly awaiting returning home, despite the fact that Richmond, Virginia was dusted with snow right now. Inside the jet behind him was a thick winter coat sitting on his seat; he had absolutely no use for it right now. Mr Byrd's wedding ring was now safely in Brandt's pocket; he hadn't the heart to get rid of it, though he had no idea what he was going to do with it once he returned home. It wasn't as though he could wear it again; it lacked its mate._

_Agent Brandt grinned as Agent Hume approached across the tarmac. _

_He was at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam airport, waiting for the plane home. The plane was decorated with US Navy insignia, and the story being spread was that it was at the airport for an emergency re-fuelling. Agents Seame and Thurar were now in Dubai, itching under their masks. A couple of days from now another team would 'arrest' Arouet and his bodyguard a day after the meeting, along with everyone else who attended, and extradite them back to the US under the guise of the US Armed Forces. But for now, both Brandt and Hume were done. At least, Hume would be the moment she shed Mrs Byrd's identity._

_Speaking of..._

_He grinned as he watched Agent Hume approach across the tarmac, from the opposite direction of the airport terminal. She was done with the silly rocks in her ears, on her fingers, around her neck, and was back in her black combats tucked into her combat boots, and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to tan a little longer. Her hair was in her signature side pony-tail, and there wasn't a lick of make-up on her face, only the light gleam of sun block on her nose. Her gun was tucked in the back of her combats, partially concealed by the heavy backpack she carried, but exactly where he kept his. No more silly, spoilt, petty Mrs Byrd. She didn't even walk the same, now that she wasn't permanently swaying her hips on stiletto heals. The only mark she left behind was the white band of skin on Hume's ring finger._

_She high-fived him as she neared, and kept heading for the plane. "Let's get out of here, Wizard."_

_And just like that, they were comrades again. Brandt signalled to the pilot to get ready for take-off, sealed the doors, clipped himself into his seat next to her, and waited. Neither of them were take-off talkers._

_As the plane levelled out, a mile up in the sky over the Indian ocean, slowly turning to fly over Africa and the Atlantic to get back to the US East coast, both Brandt and Hume took a sigh of relief, glad that their mission was over. Hume unbuckled herself and stood up, stretching, pacing to stave off restlessness. He watched her comfortably, content in knowing that she did not and would not mind. She slowly paced back to him, stretching her arms over her head. He was suddenly reminded of her coming out of the sea on the beach in her bikini, and smiled at the thought. Even fully clothed, wearing gear she'd worn since her military training days in Special Ops, she was still so beautiful he could think of nothing but her._

_She caught his eyes, smiled back. Then she came closer and frowned. "You look tired, Will." She reached out, ran a thumb lightly over the shadows under his eyes, and he rested his cheek into her palm. "Get some rest."_

_He nodded slightly, knowing not to disagree with her. Then he lifted his head up and studied her own fatigued eyes. "Did you __sleep last night?"_

_The corner of her mouth twitched. "Not much." The bed felt empty, she left unsaid. During this mission, she'd gotten used to sleeping by his side, even though it had only been a few nights. She slept better when he was there. She'd never known that about herself, that spooning all through the night was something that felt comfortable to her. In the past, a very long time ago at college with fleeting ex-boyfriends, sharing her bed to sleep had felt smothering, like sleeping with a radiator that made too much noise, regardless of whether it snored or not. Not having him around would be something to get used to again when they returned to IMF._

_There wasn't a lot of space, but somehow they managed to stretch out across the bench, his chest as her pillow, her body almost completely on top of his. He tucked her in close, his arms holding her, her hands __tucking under his shoulders. But neither slept per se. One would doze, whilst the other soothed seemingly just by breathing and beating their hearts. Eventually, as both lost track of what the actual time was in whichever time zone they now occupied, they found themselves talking._

_Brandt promised her he'd never ask her to play the honey trap again. He told her honestly that it wasn't just because he knew that it had made her skin crawl, but because he couldn't stand to watch. She told him honestly that she never wanted him to pretend to be such a shitty husband to her ever again._

_He told her she could crash at his apartment after they were debriefed, a place to lay low before heading on to wherever she needed to go. She didn't say anything to that._

_He asked her why it was so difficult to get her on the mission. Keeping nothing back, she told him it was all to do with her report on Bangkok, when she finally returned to give it._

_"I told Brassel that Agent Hunt had become dangerously reckless, more than is safe in even an IMF agent. I told him that I never wanted my life to be in Hunt's hands again, that he had sent me there to die." She shrugged. "I knew that Bangkok was a suicide mission, an _actual_ impossible mission. It didn't have to be like that though, there were easier methods. But I think - and I told Brassel this - that Ethan hasn't been the same since he had to fake his wife's death." She met Brandt's troubled expression with all-seriousness. "I might be a relatively new agent, but no agent I know would kill six men in cold blood to get himself in prison to meet a potential asset." She shrugged again. "Hunt can do what he wants with his own life. But not mine. I want to live today, fight tomorrow, as they say." She then chuckled. "Brassel wasn't so happy with my assessment. I'm a soloist now."_

_Brandt stared down at her in astonishment. "A what?"_

_She looked up at him, resting her chin on his chest. "As I did so well in Bangkok, I'll just be doing solo missions from now, as a specialist. That's why it was difficult to get hold of me, and why I delivered the 'Rabbit's Foot' alone as well." She smiled suddenly, trying not to laugh. "There are some perks: I get paid better, usually longer gaps between missions. I've got to create a cover for my downtime, and I know exactly what I'm going to do."_

_She told him about what she did after she finally got discharged from the hospital two years ago. She told him that shortly after giving her report she made a request to go for an extended vacation before returning to the field in her new role. Her psychiatrist backed her up, and off she went, trying to find corners of the earth where she didn't feel chased, knowing that IMF was following and watching the whole time._

_First stop had been Tokyo University to meet Professor Toyoda. Walking down the corridors dressed in assassin black, her Caucasian blood distinguishing her from the fully-blooded Japanese roaming the halls; people would ask about her for months to come. She'd marched into Toyoda's office, ordered the student in there to get out, and locked the door. She'd felt nothing as Toyoda failed to recognise who she was; he had after all never seen her in his life, not even as a new-born. So she told him exactly who she was, that she was Enma-O Meido, the daughter of Louisa Mill that he had not cared about to even give a kind name to. She told him that she was glad that he had had no part in her life until this meeting, that she was glad that her parents had brought her up happily and securely. And then she told him that she did not regret the decisions that she had made by herself to become the woman she was. She was glad she'd been brought up by good people who knew that blood meant nothing at all, and duty meant everything._

_She told him that if he had a tiny speck of paternal instinct in him, he should be proud of her. And then she punched him, knocking him out in an instant, and said one last thing to him: they would never meet again. And she got the first plane out of Tokyo, not caring where it went._

_She volunteered to keep herself busy, in orphanages in India, schools in Africa, farms in South America. Eventually she rocked up in Fiji, remembering that the backpackers who let her hitchhike from Milford Sound to Queenstown on her first mission had recommended the country. Their recommendation proved a good one. She pretended she was straight out of back-to-back degrees in the States, flush with inheritance from a relative who told her to have a good time with it. She was looking for an escape, and Fiji gave it to her. Her head stopped storming._

_Then IMF called her back, and as a goodbye gesture, she told her local friends that she'd provide the first investment in their ambitions, promising that if she returned, she'd see their business take root and grow. She said if, because she could never be sure she'd live long enough to come back to her newfound Eden. But she had every intention of keeping that promise._

_"You should come out sometime, see what I'm talking about," she teased Brandt. "I'll take you out scuba-diving, free of charge."_

_That night she took up his offer to stay at his apartment, sleeping safely beside him in his bed that had never had anyone else in it. He didn't think he'd ever take up her offer. As it was, inviting her into his home was hardly wise. As she slept in his arms, her back pressed against him, he knew that letting each other into their lives that much could and would compromise each other, could kill each other. He was stretching it, they both were. He still wanted to fight tomorrow. He had a duty to IMF, thus to the world. That was a heck of a lot bigger than..._

_He loved her. With his nose buried in her hair and her heart beating close to his, it was both the best feeling and the worst. And he knew deep down that to him, and to her, IMF came first. The mission came first. Saving the world came first._

_Yet two years later he took her up on her offer anyway. He'd just finished a mission that he thought would kill him and had both succeeded and survived. In a mad rush of thanking his lucky stars that he was alive, he pestered Benji until he gave him Emily Jones' address in Fiji, and boarded a plane to Nadi. He found her at the harbour, fresh off the boat after a tour, smelling of the sea and sand, her dark hair naturally sun-streaked and her skin deeply bronzed. His home was in her embrace as she screamed with joy and hugged him, not the Spartan apartment where he now slept stiffly._

_She showed him what the moon and star light looked like on the Pacific, and he sat her down on the sand in front of the construction site that was her house and told her how much he envied Ethan Hunt for his brief idyllic blink of a life he had with Julia, when they were happy. He'd seen them in Croatia, remembered envying what he thought was naivety at the time. He told her how much he envied her, and the life that she was living on the other side of the Date Line, a life just as real as the life she led for IMF, just under another name._

_He told her how much he wished he could lead that life with her._

_A single tear ran down her face, and she kissed the edge of his mouth, holding his head so he couldn't move to kiss her properly. "What happens the next time someone tries to bring nuclear armageddon on us?" She asked him softly. "I want to fight tomorrow. That means I'm not really alive today."_

_Silently, he agreed with her. The bad guys were still out there, out to hurt people directly or indirectly. He knew they were there, and knew that he was one of the few who could stop them. For as long as he was one of those few, he'd fight tomorrow._

_He still stayed with her, spooning every night because it was so normal for them, until IMF called him back. On that beach under the light of bodies thousands and millions of miles away, they silently stayed friends, and nothing more. But nothing less either._

_Sleeping so close every night was never an issue to them somehow. It wasn't that it never crossed their minds to get closer, more that they never felt safer anywhere else than in each other's arms. Given what their lives consisted of everywhere else in the world, that feeling of safety was not worth compromising. They were both human though; sometimes it was just painful, knowing the line was close, deadly so. But then she'd just hug him tighter to her, and hold on so they couldn't move closer to the line, or retreat from it either._

_On his last day, waking up at her side, he promised her one thing: if he lived long enough to retire, he was coming back here. The day he couldn't fight tomorrow, but was still alive, he'd be hers, and he'd love her until the day he died, whether she accepted him or not. In the melancholy that followed his departure from the home he'd helped her build, she promised him the same._

* * *

That had been ten years ago. She was now approaching her fortieth birthday, and he'd seen fifty go by. His hair had silvered and was transitioning to white, and age had crept into the lines around his eyes. He was still just as handsome as when he turned up at her aunt's house nearly two decades ago. They hadn't worked together since Mauritius, but she saw him every time she was back in the States: she stayed at his apartment every time, both sleeping better for it.

He was her best friend, the only person she trusted with everything she possessed, including herself. Since dragging him out of Tannin's rigged-to-blow house in New Zealand, since shooting Gong to stop her shooting him, Will had saved her life time and again; she might have been doing solo missions, but she never did them alone, he backed her up every time, not caring about IMF's rules. Brassel had chewed them both out for their closeness, but she always suspected that in reality, Brassel didn't care half as much as the rules stipulated that he should. He'd care when their affection stopped them from doing their jobs properly, when they failed their missions or failed to come home.

She knew everything about Will, including what it had been like growing up under his original name, before IMF picked him out of the Middle East, the things that cannot be pinched from a file.

She loved him too. For nearly two decades, it had kept her alive.

She sat next to him on the bench, facing him, still amazed he was back in her house. Up close, she could see Mr Byrd's wedding ring round Will's neck, hanging from a chain. She reached out and ran the tips of her fingers round the band. "I kept mine in my emergency escape pack, in case I ever have to leave here in a hurry. It's buried at the airport, so I wouldn't lose it."

He broke into a grin, reached towards her as she took hold of the chain, and they kissed the way they had always wanted to kiss each other: like they knew they'd be able to do it for the rest of their lives, but damned if they didn't make the most of it now.

* * *

Former-Head of Technical Research and Development Benji Dunn contentedly drank his beer, lounging by the pool, watching the scene before him. It was his retirement party, and there were faces here that he had never expected to see. Once upon a time, he had never expected to reach retirement age anyway, so everything on this day was a plus. His nervous babbling had long ago become a habit of the past. He only babbled now to amuse his kids. Or at least, he knew that it amused them, they pretended it embarrassed them.

His wife was inside the house in the kitchen, preparing a salad, chatting to some of the other IMF wives. Although he could not see her, Benji knew that she looked just as beautiful as she did the day he met her. That had been a very long time ago, or so it felt. His daughter, the eldest in her high school-teen years, had climbed out of her bedroom window hours ago to escape with her boyfriend to the movies, not wanting to be holed up with a bunch of oldies. His son, only just arrived into teendom, had stayed for the barbecue, but was planning on meeting his friends from school in a couple of hours. He'd told his mom that it was for homework. Neither parent was that naive, so he was doing his homework now.

Helping him was Julia Hunt, her silvery white hair and ageing lines detracting nothing from her beauty. She never had given up her married name, even after Ethan Hunt finally and inevitably undertook his last mission and never came home. Gazing at her from across the pool, Benji always regretted her fate, and blessed his lucky stars that he'd never had to drag his own wife through the same. Hopefully when he became a star in IMF's memorial wall, it was when old age took him, that there were no more bullets with his name on them.

"Hey, Benji."

Benji looked up at his companion, and smiled as Emma sat down at the edge of the pool, trailing her feet in the water. She was now in her mid-fifties, still in terrific shape. Many years ago she had retired from the field and had become an instructor, teaching new recruits to 'mean it' like her instructors had taught her. She hadn't been shot at or chased or threatened in the name of duty for years, and the peace of that knowledge shone in her skin. She looked happy, the kind of happiness that was in one's bones and soaked through to the skin.

It always amused and touched Benji to think of Emma. To think of her was to remember her sitting on her aunt and uncle's porch in her pyjamas at the age of twenty-two, nervously awaiting trouble that she'd gone and sought. To think of her was to remember she was once a better hacker than he was, and that she'd decided to not use that skill in her work. To remember that on her first mission she'd flung herself out of an airplane more readily than her team leader, that after that mission she'd earned the nickname Ninja for being so deathly silent. To remember she'd once saved his life by yanking him off his ass to escape a bell tower exploding around him.

He'd never paid her back for that one. To think of her was to remember that he was alive, that he had everything around him because she'd reacted so fast. He was glad that she was still here too, that she was so happy. She deserved it, he always thought.

He followed her gaze and smiled. On the other side of the pool was the source of Emma's happiness. Feeling Emma and Benji's eyes on him, Will Brandt looked up from the burgers he was taking care of on the barbecue and grinned back at them. He leaned down a bit to speak to the little girl at his side, helpfully spreading ketchup on burger buns, pointed across the pool, and waved as his daughter waved too. He spoke again to his daughter - Eori, after the Fijian island her parents had snuck on to once and supposedly conceived her on - and gave her a gentle push as she skipped over to her mom. Emma grinned as her giggling girl crashed into her in a big hug, and gave her a hand as the girl sat beside her, babbling about the progress of their food.

In the IMF's personnel files, Eori was listed, though not by name, as the reason why Emma gave up the field. Benji always liked this story. After Will was shot in the leg on his last mission, he'd hobbled himself out of hospital the minute the doctor told him that whilst he'd walk just fine he'd never be able to sprint again, and boarded the first plane to Nadi. A couple of months later, Benji received a postcard sent directly to his office at IMF. The postcard had nothing written on it, but the microdot under the stamp contained a single photograph: Will and Emma, smiling happily, both with wedding rings on their fingers. It had made Benji whoop with joy for them, shaking his head with disbelief. Bloody finally, he'd told them when he next saw them.

Less than a year after he received that postcard, Benji helped Will and Emma pick out their new house in the suburbs of Richmond, not far from his own home, Emma already heavily pregnant. Emma had sold her share of her scuba-diving company to her partners in Fiji, but was umming and erring over selling her house. Benji didn't blame her for deciding to keep it in the end: he remembered visiting it to oversee the security installation many years ago, remembered how content she was there after a few years of being shadowed over by the past. It had been her sanctuary from the madness of IMF, much like Benji's sanctuary was his own family and home. But both Will and Emma decided that they couldn't stay in Fiji, in that dream house so far away from the other world they inhabited. They both felt their sense of duty, even now, and so returned to pursue other roles that meant they could still be married, still be parents, still be agents without jeopardising everything they held dear. The Fiji house was now their vacation home.

Their only regret today, Benji knew, was that it had taken so long. Will was in his early fifties when Eori was born, Emma just turned forty, both older than Benji had been when his kids had even been an idea.

And now, Eori attended the school that both Benji's daughter and son had attended. Brandt was considering retiring soon too, after many years working contentedly with 'Chief Analyst' on his office door again. Emma, having just celebrated her fiftieth birthday, was not so far off, but knew that soon age would have to make her reconsider the physical life of being an instructor. When she first started she was faster, stronger and more agile than some of her recruits after they'd passed their tests. Now, they were all slowly surpassing her, as she knew they were meant to.

Not once in Eori's lifetime had either Will or Emma ever considered returning to the field. They'd both been asked, and both declined. Neither felt the need to fight in the name of duty any more. Besides, it would have been a logistical headache: who would have done the school runs?

Brandt tossed the burgers on to their buns, and made his way over to his family. Since being shot in the leg on his last mission, he'd never walked the same again, and now that old age was creeping in, the limp that had been less noticeable once was becoming more so now. Benji remembered that even after it had healed Brandt had never been able to sprint again, as his doctor predicted, and could only just go for daily runs with Emma. Now, it was just Emma running.

As Will sat on the other side of his daughter, passing Emma's plate across, complete familiarity to the three sitting at the edge of the pool, Benji wanted to ask his former team leader a question he'd asked many times in the years gone: when did you guys actually get together? Will was too rational to rush into getting married within two months after arriving in Fiji again, let alone father a child almost immediately after that. Emma was too patient and too calm to rush either. Benji could not fathom that the two had spent nearly two decades _not _sleeping together. As in, _sleeping together_, as Emma always liked to make fun of him every time he'd asked her, reminding him that actually sleeping together had been so normal to the two of them that Brandt had never bothered setting up a guest bedroom in his apartment in his single days._  
_

Will always shrugged contentedly when Benji asked him, the same shrug Emma would give. "We're together now," he always said. "I just wanted to keep her safe, Benji."

Emma always put it best: "We didn't want to be Romeo and Juliet." Then she'd grin to herself, the grin a woman had when she was happy, and loved-up. Obviously the whole just-sleeping thing had come to its end. Finally.

Benji's son came out of the house and gleefully told him he was done with his homework. Benji grinned, congratulated his 'champ', and thanked Julia for helping him. Julia barely heard him. She was staring over at the three sitting at the edge of the pool, watching enviously as Eori Menneer giggled at her father, at the ketchup he had dribbled down his chin, and as Emma, laughing too, reached out un-awkwardly to wipe the sauce from the corner of his mouth. Benji finally stopped doubting their story. Will Brandt and Emma Hume - Mr and Mrs Jerry 'Will' and Emily 'Emma' Menneer - who had waited so patiently for the right time, had worked, were working. Ethan and Julia, who hadn't, had not. Maybe there was something to their calm rationale, of all those years of just making each other feel safe over everything else, over burning passion.

After all, they got to live happily ever after.

* * *

**Always wanted to use that last line, just once, without kicking myself for it, haha.**

**Many thanks to all those who have read this, and to all those who will read this. Please let me know what you think of it, reviews fight off the writers' block. Otherwise, now that we depart, take care.**

**Guard of the Heradi.**


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